Pointing to ‘big shots’

Apr 03, 2019 Editorial, Features / Columnists

The talking has eased to an unsettled murmur. That is, until a principal of a school sat down to share some views with Kaieteur News. His woes and wounds came from big shots. Literally three of them. But that telltale two-word term “big shots” also have another meaning in Guyana.
It is an ominous one with vast implications beyond the already serious injuries of this unprecedented felony meted out to a school head.
Big shots mean big fishes and big people or in his quoted words, “it could perhaps end up pointing to people of real prominence in society, [which] of course, if true, make it much more difficult to get justice.”
Colloquially, big fish alternately termed big boss and ‘big maan’ in this society translates into big money, big position, big heights, big places, big power, and big influence. It could be commerce, politics, civil society, or law enforcement.
When that net is cast, only the mass of impoverished of the great unwashed working class is exempted. They have neither power nor reach nor receptive ear. No staying power either: it is grin and bear for these many lowly, unfortunate ones. Take a number, say a prayer, call again.
Whither justice? Whither peace of mind? Of environment? As felonious matters such as Dr. O’Toole’s stir the media, the age-old question of whether this is a country of men or laws, is no longer a question. The resignation and incontestable tilt are towards men; men who move matters to their favour through phone calls, through cash, through connectivity, through coverup of criminality.
Perpetrators of a certain caliber do not even have to evade or falsify or go to any trouble because they are rarely hauled before the scathing public eye or anywhere else. They fix. They solve behind the scenes and from high elevations. And when the rational throws in and analyses the nexus of the underground economy, the political powers, the commercial princes, and their law enforcement and legal cabals, then it is nothing doing. An impenetrable wall of silence; a suspended tide of no movement; a protection racket that stretches from the elites to the illiterates to the reprobates, colluders all, descends.
They wear suits, do not ride bicycles or travel in minibuses, attend houses of worship, grace the cocktail circuit, and patronize the better eating houses. In short, they are loaded. Those that are loaded attract a surrounding cast. The ripples flow endlessly out into wider, larger Guyanese society.
Law and order? That is for the peasants; the empty-pocketed drunk driver, the uneducated domestic abuser, the bottom of the barrel denizens of the bloated criminal class.
This is a system long used to, and long experienced in the art of the coverup and off-the-books resolution: from elections to voters’ lists to murder to one felony after the other. Just retrace steps to the fingers pointed and the fingerprints erased in a lady about town named Monica Reece.
Other victims of serious felonies crying to the heavens for the relief of justice can understand and empathize with the circumstances of Dr. O’Toole. It is the stalls of the stonewalling and the enterprising.
When the devout number the crooked within their bosom, when law enforcement captains vie for customers to add to a stable of retainers, when political luminaries enjoy the fruits from extending welcome and sanctuary to the circle of the contaminated that devastates this society, then this country is in grave trouble.
For it looks powerlessly at mountains tumbling down on its head and nowhere to run, no one to appeal to, and nothing to protect. Not law. Not judiciary. Not police. Not state.
Doubters should check with those waiting for justice.

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