Saving Mr Rohee
The political administration was bound to come out ‘batting’ for Clement Rohee. It was important that it do so unequivocally. Such speculation doing the rounds that faced with opposition political pressure the ruling party might jettison Rohee, had to be put to rest. That would have created an unacceptable level of political anxiety for the Ramotar administration; so that last week Cabinet Secretary Roger Luncheon had to come out, fists flying – so to speak –leaving no doubt that the Ramotar administration was ready to square off” over Rohee. The administration, Luncheon said, was not about to get rid of “one of our best ministers.”
The least that can be said in response to the Cabinet Secretary’s assessment of Mr. Rohee’s ministerial calibre is that he is perfectly entitled to his opinion. We are, however, inclined to the view that it is Clement Rohee’s value as a ‘Party man’ rather than his worth as a minister that has made the ruling party come out to ‘bat’ for him.
One thing that can be said for the PPP is that it does not discard its own without good reason. Clement Rohee, unquestionably, is one of the PPP’s ‘own.’ More than that, he has not – at least as far as we know – given his Party ‘good reason’ to discard him.
Again, while we believe that there are those who would break a lance with Dr. Luncheon over his assessment of Clement Rohee’s ministerial record we doubt that too many people who know Mr. Rohee would question his unswerving loyalty to the PPP, his political reputation having been built as an ever watchful and assertive sentinel of the party.
It was the same high-spirited aggression, the same mindfulness of what was good for the party, that he brought to Takuba Lodge in 1992, so that while his disposition often appeared both misplaced and decidedly counterproductive while he wore a ministerial hat, that was his way of serving his Party. If the truth be told Clement Rohee appeared to encounter more than a little difficulty in making the transformation from PPP activist to a Cabinet Minister. Indeed, there are those who feel that he probably never will.
It was the difficulty which he faced in transitioning that lay at the heart of the problems that coincided with his arrival at Takuba Lodge. Those who knew Mr. Rohee felt that during his early years as Foreign Minister, he spent far more time trying to seek out and neutralize those whom he deemed to be saboteurs and fifth columnists than trying to consolidate foreign policy. The fact that he never really secured the trust of many of the foreign service functionaries who had served under the previous administration may well have been his undoing as far as his tenure as Foreign Minister was concerned.
During those years the walls of Takuba Lodge fairly resonated with controversy and while his later years as Foreign Minister coincided with ruthless pillorying from the government’s political opponents, a circumstance which damaged both his personal and his political image, Clement Rohee’s stock as a PPP man always remained high. Over those years of absorbing one deluge after another of carping public criticism Clement Rohee’s position as Foreign Minister never appeared threatened until 2000 when Surinamese gunboats evicted the CGX rig prospecting for oil.
Even then his stock continued to be high. From the Foreign Ministry he was moved to the post of Foreign Trade Minister, a ‘holding’ position created specifically for Rohee, a sort of bridge between the Foreign Ministry and Home Affairs Ministry portfolios which, interestingly enough, has since been gradually killed off.
If his accession to the Home Affairs portfolio demonstrated that Mr. Rohee was still one of the party’s political heavyweights, the actual job was to prove far trickier than that of Foreign Minister. At Takuba Lodge – the public and political criticism notwithstanding – foreign policy tended to attract much less public attention. Rohee went to the Home Affairs Ministry at a time when the ‘death squad’ scandal associated with his predecessor had long seriously disfigured the image of the Force. By that time too public perception of the Force was being driven by evidence that it had become largely ineffective in curbing crime and, moreover, that the high number of rogue cops in the Force made the police part of the problem rather than part of the solution. All of this was far too big a burden for Mr. Rohee to carry.
Under a governance structure underpinned by meritocracy, the political survival of Ministers depends much more on performance than on party loyalty. Over time, an objective assessment of the GPF would almost certainly have led to Rohee’s removal from office. As it happens and for all the continual erosion of public safety he remains, at least according to the Cabinet Secretary, “one of our best ministers.” One wonders about the rationale for such an assessment.
Linden really ought to have been Mr. Rohee’s Waterloo. The government clearly underestimated the resolve of the Linden community in the wake of the killing of the three young men during the electricity protest. It did not anticipate the robustness of the protest and the attendant pressure on the political administration. In another place the government would have let its Home Affairs Minister ‘carry the can’ for the debacle that ought not to have happened under his watch. But that is not how the PPP works. Clement Rohee is a good Party man and for that alone the PPP feels he is more than worth saving.
