In the midst of an uncontrollable crime situation which up to now cannot be tamed by Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan, Guyanese are presented with initiatives on which the Minister has placed equal if not more importance. Among these, are his famous moves to install a 2 am curfew on bars which, as any sound sociologist would acknowledge, will encourage illegal underground activities and rebellious behavior from those regular party crowds and their party entourage. Then there’s the initiative to reinforce the capacity of armed forces by introducing horses and “canine elements” as Minister Ramjattan indicated, so that we could measure up to the Canadian Mounties, to which our Public Securities Minister dearly aspires. However, the Canadians have a full-fledged armed police force with specialised units which could function perfectly fine without Mounties who, for years now, are being seen more as a national emblem than a security force.

But the initiative which strikes as most irrelevant to the context of crimes which are currently defined by armed robberies, murders, rapes and other physical assaults often with an ethnic undertone, is the one aimed at addressing Cybersecurity. If Minister Ramjattan was to personally conduct a survey on regular Guyanese on the streets, one wonders how many would find the pertinence of reinforcing cybersecurity in a country which is presently being ravaged by deathly crimes and witch-hunting, tainted with the hues of ethnic discrimination.

The Public Security Ministry has yet to explain what is meant by implementing a cybersecurity strategy and how regular Guyanese citizens, most of whom hardly conduct online transactions, would be under cyber threats. With regards to private and public sector transactions and online safety, the Public Security Ministry should have also produced the requisite numbers which would reflect their vulnerability through the number of attacks or attempted attacks rebutted. In sum, what Ramjattan should have done, was convince the Guyanese people that they need and would be much safer under the umbrella of a cyberstrategy.

However, as seems to be the trend of the coalition Government, public consultation and research backed initiatives are to date far flung from the methodology it employs. In the case of the Public Securities Ministry, it is evident that the Minister and his staff are in dire need of advice on how to address crime and security in Guyana. But Guyanese are yet to elucidate whether the Minister understands the nature of crimes, the correlation between the crime increase and the election of the new Government, or if he simply chooses the use the ostrich approach due to his incapacity in the position he now occupies.

In all fairness to Ramjattan, during his parliamentary budget presentation, he did produce some numbers which according to him proved that crime began to increase since February, “long before” the Government was elected. Unfortunately, Ramjattan once again failed to find the correlation between the then Opposition imposed political crisis leading up to the elections and the crime increase. If one were to compare crime rates preluding to each election in Guyana, it is most likely that these would be higher than usual. While discriminately and erroneously inventing a link between the rise in crime and the sacking of Amerindian CSOs, he failed to connect the dots between the lack of financial resources caused by the unreasonably imposed budget cuts by the then Opposition of which he himself was a part and the rise in crime, fuelled by underlying social factors such as unemployment.

His incapacity to link cause and effect was worsened when he defended that the CSOs weren’t paid since April by the previous administration. Surely, the Minister must have remembered that his party was part of the Opposition consensus to slash the then Amerindian Affairs Ministry’s budget which totaled $1.1 billion, inclusive of $796 million allocated to the Youth Entrepreneurship and Apprenticeship Programme, under which the CSOs fell. Yet, the previous administration provisioned the stipends of CSOs up to April. Minister Ramjattan has also omitted that APNU/AFC is responsible for respecting the contracts of the Government of Guyana, whether verbal or written, regardless of the change in administration, as befits the internationally recognised principle of continuity.