Immunity and impotency

Oct 22, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News-  Pursuant to longstanding international law there is this fortress called diplomatic immunity.  No troubles here.  Pursuant to the Guyana Constitution, there is this creature called presidential immunity.  My troubles begin with that provision, disaster.  I see shades of the divine right of kings, and that one from the Vatican about papal infallibility.  Regardless of misgivings and disagreements, they are in the books, products of time and custom.  Now, a question for the impressive personages of the Hons. Irfaan Ali, Bharrat Jagdeo, and Anil Nandlall.

Could one of my dear brothers-younger, keener in intellect, more boisterously voluble-say when did the Guyana Police Force get immunity?  Immunity from being held accountable?  Immunity from the expanse of what that means, stretching to jurisprudential arenas and the corrective confines of national remedial penitentiaries?  Momentarily, I overlook monies to be returned, plus those multiples that should be part of the penalties for holding up citizens on the street, or via other strategies in higher police offices.  As my Jewish rabbi enlightened: ask one question and the floodgates lead to many follow-up ones.  It is not only when the GPF was granted immunity status, but who made that decision?  Because they are honorable men of the first standing, it could never be President Ali nor former president Jagdeo nor Attorney General Nandlall. If it was not them, and it certainly wasn’t me, then who?

The trouble with deep thinking is that it leads to dangerous paths.  For everybody.  Senior members of the GPF, an institution with its own encyclopedic history [own sacred constitution], have been fingered in one allegedly highly questionable development after another, yet there has been nothing other than boo and poo.  Boo represents the impotence of the PPP Government. Poo also captures that silence and impotence.  Senior PPP Government officials have either pooh-pooed terribly disgraceful circumstances, while even more senior functionaries try to dig out the ‘scaaf’ of what Guyanese call boo-boo from their eyes.  It is not simply government bigwigs not seeing anything wrong, but the big political Doberman pinchers have hustled to reserve their right to remain silent.  From Matthews Ridge to State House Ridge (and others), there has been this shroud of silence.  It’s as if death is in the neighborhood or it has already happened in the house.  More than once.  There is Freedom House.  There is State House.  There is that House of Horrors: The Vice President’s official den of operations.  Silence and impotence all over.

Why the silence and how could there be this total impotence on nationally embarrassing matters involving envelopes, weddings, busts, airports, Americans, among other memorable developments?  There is a peculiar rustling that interferes with the pall of silence.  It is of the hushed movements of senior men from one place to another, of threadlike sketches about what has been done, and what should be expected to follow.  Now if there is any Guyanese who is so foolish as to expect revelations from SOCU, they really ought to be slapped with felony charges for their naivete and gullibility on the secrets that reign, the impotence that accompanies.  Then, there is the Office of the DPP.  Ask it to prosecute a dog and a rat is the result.  Who is watching out for whom, catching what for Guyanese?

Secrets are a billion-dollar business.  Political secrets represent multibillion dollar trading opportunities. The higher the politicians, the bigger the shakedowns.  The owners of secrets are well positioned to beat-up, beatdown, bargain.  What applies in the corporate world has even more application in the world of government where reporting and accounting are low priority considerations.  Also, the lower the character of those in charge of government, the more and deeper their secrets are, which means that they are held hostage to those in law enforcement.  I recommend that Guyanese treat themselves to a crash course on how the former head of America’s vaunted FBI took care of business, protected himself. He held presidents to ransom.  It is how law enforcement bosses do their version of CYA.  Translation: cover your rear (a**).  This is not taught in textbooks, seminars, or offered through American training.

In the final analysis, after all the Power Points and key operating manuals are farces, meaning nothing.  Silence is where it’s at: mutual back scratching, forced impotence.  In other words, the GPF stays silent on the enormous secrets its senior people have about the crimes of key figures in the PPP Government and those powers are only too glad (too compromised) to return the favor.  Especially when ranking big shots in the GPF overindulge in what is best termed unprecedented institutional excesses.  At the risk of repetition, this is the nutshell: who has skeletons for whom, who knows where the skeletons are buried.  He who knoweth the whereabouts of the smoking guns of the PPP Government guarantees silence.  The silence of the GPF inspires the silence and impotence of the PPP Government.  Perhaps, Drs. Ali and Jagdeo and Nandlall may care to comment.  I caution discretion on the part of the latter, for the Yanks have their, ah, loaded files.  They tell some revealing stories about what is really going on in this country behind the cloak of democracy.

(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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• Anil Nandlall, Bharat Jagdeo, DPP, Irfaan Ali, PPP Government

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