One head for each of the 19 gone

May 28, 2023 News

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Hard truths by GHK Lall…

Kaieteur News – A start has been made to the heavy duty of burying our young dead.  For each of the 19 dead, 1 head should roll.  Ministers must take responsibility, let there be some start in this country towards accountability.  More heads must fall, so that elected and selected officials take their duty seriously, do it honestly.  The fallen cry for justice, some peace, for the official massacre in Mahdia.

It is a brutal, unsparing, term ‘official massacre’, but it is the only choice left.  What else is there to describe accurately and frankly what took place in Mahdia?  I dismiss the platitudes, rancid politicking, and pungent theater that accompanied the poignancy of 19 of our young and vulnerable, now no more.  We have already succeeded (political carnivals surrounding their passing) in transforming a tragedy into long, great individual, communal torment.  There was the grotesque showcase that was the gaudy Umana Yana circus from classless officials, individuals lacking standards, and a group profoundly ignorant of the decorum that visits death.  In a time commanding space and grace, there was leaking, reeking, profaning political displays.  I ask again: is there no standard left in this country?  Will there ever be any understanding of thoughtfulness, sincerity, and decency to let simple, rural people who have lost a world grieve in their own little world?  In their own time, and own manner?

Deaths are not a time for displays of spiritual depravity, rank political jockeying.  Sometimes, there is too much political and leadership cleverness locally.  It smells.  This was part of the spectacle of ‘caring’ and ‘look how much is being done’ and ‘rallying around during grave trouble.’  It was crude, rude, and lacking food for the soul.  I discerned the overdone, what is too much for even the toughest digestive constitutions.  Puking results from the pathetic displays of clamoring about caring.

Were these to distract from the underlying failures, the frequent fires that rear their monstrous heads too often for comfort?  Was all of the leadership and ministerial ceremoniousness and sanctimoniousness a concerted attempt to make those iron bars that lock children in surface dungeons disappear?  They are seared irremovably into the foreheads of those who have presided over this horror, this revulsion, this crime.

It is standard for the minister on duty at such a horrific time to do the principled thing: resign.  The Hon. Minister of Education should do the right thing for what unfolded on her watch.  Resign.  Too many fires too often (after a single jail fire, I had publicly called for Minister Ramjattan to resign, or be fired).  Whoever came up with this idea to house in steel cages young children should be fired immediately.  No amounts of official ceremonials and partisan testimonials are adequate to compensate for this horrendous loss of life in the worst of desperate circumstances.  Circumstances that compelled children to claw with their fingernails into unyielding concrete walls, while a chorus of doomed screams told their agonizing, devastating fate. It just should not have been.  Not even for an unowned dog of no standing!

Heads must tumble, they must clatter loudly, so that those responsible for this tragedy-ministers, regional administrators, public servants-are harshly awakened and sent unceremoniously packing.  We talk too much in this country, have fallen in love with ourselves, and are impressed by our self-congratulatory speeches.  Somebody has to pay today for the fallen 19 before some of them had even touched 16.  If ministers, (and they know who they are, so does the President) are so barbaric as not to tender their resignations, then President Ali must demand such.  And if none is still not forthcoming, then there should be a public firing.  Is the President up to this task, or is it going to be the usual rancid, rotted politics, as camouflaged by a CoI?  We do not need a CoI to identify the perps?

Our children were hung out to dry, strangled on a string, left gasping futilely for oxygen in that hellacious inferno that was resting and sleeping quarters in a place named Mahdia, now imprinted in infamy. For this official felony, many of them, there must be an accounting.  The scorched souls of those incinerated before their prime year shad even begun must be given that small satisfaction; offered that balm for their fearsome pain, their formidable fears, their lives ebbing away from flesh set afire, from tissue baked, blasted, beyond what is humanly tolerable.

The least, the most dignified, the definitely honorable thing to take place now is for those closest to this all too preventable tragedy to resign.  Resign quietly or be publicly terminated.  Just as how the young lives of those 19 were terminated with incendiary finality, so it must be with those who stand officially ensnared, who stand nationally condemned.  Nothing else will do; nothing but such should be the first business of the past days.  It is what should have occurred before.  It starts with two ministers, extends to some senior public servants.  Only in this way will some iota, some tendril, of justice, of what is just, grace the hard, bitter passing of those 19 Amerindian children now forever lost, gone.  It can’t be business as usual.

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• Deaths are not a time for displays of spiritual depravity, describe accurately and frankly what took place in Mahdia?, left gasping futilely for oxygen, Our children were hung out to dry, strangled on a string

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