Proposed cybercrime changes: rich resourcefulness or reason to fear

Sep 18, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The social media space in Guyana is out of control.  It needs policing.  The proposed amendments to the Cybercrime law would introduce some much-needed regulation.  On the face of it, there is not much to find fault with, even what could be supported, but only when certain conditions are present.

First, government must be the epitome of honesty and high regard for the rights of all citizens.  It begins and ends with holding constitutional provisions as sacred, hence inviolable.  All of them, and alongside that all citizens mean just that, in that it extends to those considered partisan and in strident opposition to those in charge, their policies, and their programs.  Personally speaking, a government that truly cherishes democratic ideals would go an extra yard to ensure that conscientious objectors and those deemed as opponents be afforded additional space in which to have their say and go about their ways.  Naturally, this must be within the perimeters of what is considered dignified and the principled exercise of citizenship.  It is more than political science or sociology.  It is about the straight paths of life lived by the law-abiding without fear because national leaders are about moral, ethical, and lawful practices.  When a government is of this caliber, no one fears any amendments to any cybercrime law, because the government has earned that trust and the comforts that go along with it.  The PPP Government’s record confirms this standard or its record condemns it.  It doesn’t matter whether it is today’s PPP Government that has compiled a litany of atrocities against citizens; or the ones that came before.  I can attest to the atrocities of this PPP Government, and there are more than a few others who can do similarly, due to their own experiences of barbarism at the hands of old and new PPP Governments.  Additionally, there are those who observe the menacing environment, the overheated and over-the-top reactions of government, leaders, and their willing agents, and seek safety by shrinking into their shells.  One voice lost in a fledgling society as Guyana is one that cannot be replaced, an injustice to the citizenry, the heights they can’t scale, the possibilities negated.  In a pronouncement that is short, stiff, and severe: the PPP Government as it stands insecure and paranoid is not worthy of trust, but one that’s feared.  I scorn it.

Second, governments of Guyana may have manifested all the attributes of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  But national governments are not run by animals, but by people, i.e., men and women, hopefully brimming with the better human touches, and less of the beastly.  I am tempted to identify the parade of PPP Government leaders, for the most part, as modern-day replicas of demented Animal Farm characters, but that falls short.  When I study them, the resemblance is almost identical to the nightmare that is 1984, also from the far-thinking mind and free-flowing pen of the same Englishman.  Is not the imaginary 1984, the sinister reality of 2024 Guyana?  With few exceptions, the leaders in the PPP Government are contemptuous of that standard, what has been the guiding star of the great ones: cui servire est regnare (to serve is to rule).  In the reverse national order that is now so firmly entrenched in Guyana, there is the distortion that follows this maxim: to rule is to repress.  To rule is to retaliate.  To rule is to ruin.  But there is still the profaneness of character in the leadership cohort to call that democracy.  Judging from the accumulation of wrongs meted out by PPP Government leadership against dissenting Guyanese, the proposed Cybercrime amendments encircle repression, retaliation, and potential ruination.  One of the defining characteristics of PPP Government leadership is to study where pockets of civil difference and resistance assemble and then move to suffocate such out of existence.  What is called reform is what deforms the freedoms that are taken for granted in a genuine democracy.  This becomes blindingly obvious when the layers are rolled back, and the product is scrutinized.  The Cybercrime amendments represent such leadership paranoia and deformity.  In the style of Stalin and the Third Reich, those who dared to disagree were seen as deviants and parasites to be crushed.  How many dissenters are going to be imprisoned, put away for a long enough interval to silence them, to send an ominous message to those harboring contrarian ideas? When government leaders plot ways to criminalize its own citizens to ensure that all be of one mind and chant with one voice, then what could be said of healthy discourse, civil liberty, and political vibrancy?  As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”  It was American Founding Father, George Washington, who said “error is the portion of humanity, and to censure it, whether by this or that public character, is the prerogative of freemen.”

Third, the government and its leaders are hell-bent on narrowing the circle of critical conversation, tamping down on distressing speech, social media malignancies, and individual or group mischiefs. In conception, there is something to be said for those. Here is the litmus test: Who is going to police, collar, and carry in mechanical cages to the criminal courts those who operate on behalf of the PPP Government and its leaders?  The proposed Cybercrime amendments will most likely become law.  What application of the law then, what level of enforcement field then, when known PPP Government characters have demonized and criminalized Guyanese?

Fourth, one of the chief features of a degraded government and its depraved leadership is to neutralize, then destabilize, and finally compromise major institutions that can serve as a check on their egregious exploits.  The PPP Government has done that to law enforcement, crucial public sector agencies, civil society, and the professions. Independent media stands as the last bulwark to be toppled.  It is bogeyman, bugbear, and bone-in-the-throat.  The new cybercrime laws would emasculate that lingering remnant. Total control is the life and death objective.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• amendments, changes, Cybercrime, GHK Lall, resourcefulness

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