Rising to the occasion
Editorial
Stabroek News
January 12, 2003
At the end of 2002 it was impossible to conceive that the New Year could be worse than the preceding ten months - but it is. Ordinary citizens now feel like strangers in their own land; the neighbours are the same, the daily routines are the same, the landscape is the same, but the context in which we live out our lives is altogether different. It is as if some malignant force had descended upon us and turned our value system upside down, and in place of all the things that defined us as moral beings, had substituted everything that was baleful. Will the country ever be the same again, one wonders? The answer is, probably not.
We have arrived at this point in the first instance because of the weakness of a government that appears incapable of confronting reality. It may be in office, but it is fast losing its capacity to exert authority, simply because it has not been actively exercising that authority. It has failed to protect its constituents on the lower East Coast; it has failed to protect all the other citizens who have been the target of bandits; it has failed to keep the eastern corridor open and safe; and it has failed to deal with Fortress Buxton. Whatever its achievements last year - and there are some - they pale into insignificance when considered against these failures.
The first duty of any government is to ensure the safety of its citizens in a larger sense. Without basic security, everything else has little meaning. The administration can lecture us about improvements in this or that sector until it is silly, but if citizens are afraid on the streets, and are not even safe in their workplaces and homes, what does it matter whether or not the Government has secured further debt relief from this or that international financial agency, or whether or not gold prices are on the rise?
Of course it is true that the administration operates in a difficult political environment, but it is the government, and it is the one with its hands on the levers of the state. Whatever the variables in the political equation, it cannot abdicate its responsibilities to the people of this country. One might have thought that it would have discovered by now that the problem will not go away if it closes its eyes; that will only make things worse. The Government should have taken action months ago, and now that it has left the situation to evolve unimpeded, it will be that much more difficult to bring it under control.
In circumstances where bandits are threatening the state itself, one might have thought that the two major political parties would have worked out that their only salvation was some measure of co-operation before both of them become entirely irrelevant. If the forces of disintegration continue their advances, it is not just the PPP/C which will be under threat, but the PNCR as well. That the party as an organization has already lost control of many of its supporters was on public display at the funeral of Mr Hoyte. There was a crowd which appeared to be dancing to a different tune, and the piper was not the PNCR leadership.
Since the main opposition party can no more allow the state to go under for its own survival than can the PPP/C, it should be prepared to do one urgent thing, however unpopular with some of its constituents. It should go back to Parliament for at least the single purpose of setting up the appointive committee which would allow for the constitution of the service commissions, and in particular the Police Service Commission. Even if the PNCR withdrew again from Parliament thereafter to pursue its struggle concerning the management and sectoral committees, at least we would get a Commissioner of Police.
At last week’s press briefing, Mr Corbin said the PNCR was being wrongly blamed for the non-appointment of Mr Felix as Police Commissioner. Whether he knows it or not, no thinking citizen takes him seriously. This is an emergency, and the appointment of a police commissioner cannot be held hostage to the impasse over the management and sectoral committees of Parliament, even though it has to be acknowledged that the Government has been particularly blinkered on those issues.
Of course Mr McDonald could be sent off on retirement, and Mr Felix could perform the functions of the commissioner, but that would be totally unsatisfactory. We have a police force which is utterly demoralized, and we need a commissioner who is secure in his appointment, who will not be subject to the whims of politicians, and who can professionalise the force. Other appointments and promotions in the GPF are also being held up by the non-constitution of the Police Service Commission - not to mention the problems the absence of the other commissions is creating - and the PNCR has it in its power to do something about it.
With some level of informal contact between the President and the Leader of the PNCR - preferably in not too public a setting which would be likely to sink any meeting before it ever got under way - the issue of the setting up of the appointive committee, among other things could be discussed. And it is not just the PNCR which needs to make a concession; the governing party needs to show far more flexibility and imagination on the political front than it has been wont to do. The traditional policy of absolute obduracy has to change. This is not the 1960s; it is the new millennium, and the world is an entirely different place, and we now have an entirely new generation.
But whatever the PNCR does or does not do, in the end the responsibility for security lies with the Government. At the simplest level, it needs a viable security plan, and then it needs the willpower to implement it and follow through with it. It cannot do things by half measures as it appears to have been doing; that will just make matters worse. The nation waits to see whether, against all expectations, it can rise to the occasion in this new year.
