All the help it can get
Editorial
Stabroek News
August 16, 2002
Do we have a government? If we do, where is it? And if it is there, but the rest of the country has not noticed, just what is its plan? What strategies has it devised to confront the current situation? More members of the force were shot and injured this week, one of them an ordinary traffic policeman directing traffic, yet there is hardly a whisper from the corridors of power as to how law and order is to be maintained, and exactly how the citizenry is to be protected. Here is the framework of the state disintegrating right underneath the feet of the members of the administration, and they are totally oblivious to it, as if they were living in another dimension.
As the President dashed off to Jamaica to celebrate that nation's independence anniversary, and one of his ministers dashed off to the United States in the company of Mr Jagdeo's PR spokesman to tell Guyanese in New York what was happening here, one could not help but reflect whether this was not evidence that the government was suffering from escapism. Is it, citizens were wondering, that the reality is too terrible for the administration to contemplate, and that after forty years of saying the same things they have no new ideas to offer?
President Jagdeo did re-emerge at a press conference on Wednesday to tell the media about measures to speed up the process of acquiring protective gear for policemen - no one will quarrel with that, however late it might have been in coming. However, he also referred to Guyana's vulnerability in the global market, and how this country is affected economically by what happens outside. True enough, except that at this point in time what is happening in the local economy - businesses closing, workers being laid off, skilled employees emigrating and commerce declining - is all internally generated. If the government can't start thinking in a revolutionary fashion fairly soon, it will soon be administering just the shell of an economy and in due course possibly, the shell of a country.
It has often been the case in history that weak governments, unable to cope with serious threats, have clung almost desperately to the analyses and rhetoric with which they have operated in the past. Unable to reconcile to the radical changes in the external reality they recite these over and over, as if the very repetition in itself would somehow wreak an alteration in the circumstances of their governance.
Is that why, for example, in response to this crisis all we are hearing from members of the ruling party is the old shibboleths? Is that why they are wasting so much time, instead of exploring possibilities for novel solutions, trying to score political points against the main opposition party? All of which is not to say that the PNC/R has not been guilty of precisely the same thing; it is just that the PNC/R is not in office, the PPP/C is - although more often than not it behaves as if it isn't.
Why is it, for example, when quite unexpectedly, the PNC/R came out of its rhetorical crease and urged that there be a national dialogue and consensus on the crime wave - something which sounded to the ordinary citizen like progress - the response of the General Secretary of the PPP/C was so sullen? Almost inevitably, the PNC/R retort came back that if the PPP/C believed that it could solve the crime situation by itself, then let it do so.
In the first place, that the PNC/R is prepared to talk to the PPP/C about anything at all is progress; it is what citizens' groups have been campaigning about for the past few weeks. In the second place, tackling the crime wave will be easier if the PNC/R is on board. If it is that the governing party simply did not believe that the PNC/R offer was serious, they at least should have shown more enthusiasm and put it to the test; they had nothing to lose by doing so, and everything to gain.
Thirdly, this offer was made before the PNC/R Congress. One might have thought by now that the PPP/C would have become aware that the main opposition party was under pressure from the radicals. Exactly what role these are likely to play at the upcoming biannual meeting is difficult to gauge from outside the PNC/R. However, even if they don't manage to put people in place at a high level, they will surely attempt to influence the line the party takes in the current circumstances. Given that, what on earth is the General Secretary of the governing party doing undermining a rational approach coming from the current executive of the other side?
It is true that the President's Office subsequently tried to redeem the situation by welcoming the offer without any caveats, and now we have the President indicating that Minister Gajraj has been assigned to contact the various political parties on the matter of crime. At this stage, however, the prognostications are that the PNC/R will now be the one to be sullen.
It is time for the citizens' groups to speak up again. This little glimmer of opportunity must not be allowed to slip away. The Government, as stated above, has demonstrated its total incapacity to cope with the situation, and in the meantime the state is slithering into anarchy by default. Nothing will happen before the PNC/R Congress, but after that one hopes that civil society, various citizens, etc, will attempt to nudge the parties into staking out a political space where there can be a common approach to crime; the PPP/C clearly needs all the help it can get.