Wrong man, wrong idea, wrong time

The crisis that is simmering in the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and the Cabinet ostensibly seems to surround the fate of Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee. It is difficult to imagine that one man’s employment should affect all three branches of the state – the executive, legislative and judiciary – so seriously and simultaneously.

It is wrong, however, to think that all of this is about Rohee. It is also wrong to think that the country’s security problems and the conduct of the Guyana Police Force have arisen out of the shooting of three Lindeners on 18th July. Everyone knows that public security is in a parlous state. Everyone expects that the executive, having consistently refused to remedy the problem over a period of several years, must be held accountable. The legislative branch, therefore, has been obliged to act to protect citizens from harm and to prevent damage to the state.

The fact is that the last twelve years have witnessed the emergence of an elected ‘oligarchy’ which now controls the state, and this explains Rohee’s role in the order of things. Rohee’s continued tenure of office and the manner in which he performs his duty are precisely what the People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration requires of him. His removal would not be a personal loss or embarrassment, but will cause the PPP/C’s house of cards to come tumbling down. Rohee’s presence and performance, it should be understood, are essential to protecting Guyana’s deformed economy.

The phenomenal rise of the oligarchy has been exhaustively examined and exposed by two economists – Clive Thomas and Tarron Khemraj. Thomas, in a series of articles on the Criminalisation of the State, critically analysed the way in which the state itself was seen as tolerant to transnational crimes and corruption. Tarron Khemraj, more recently, explained the emergence of an oligarchy in a series entitled The Elected Oligarchy and Economic Underdevelopment.” Both series were published during Bharrat Jagdeo’s 12-year presidency.

An oligarchy, simply, refers to the rule of a country by a few persons. The PPP, having been awarded the single largest amount of votes – about 48.6 per cent – in the November 2011 general elections, can claim to have been ‘elected.’  The party, however, does not practice the same internal electoral democracy as the rest of the country does in the general elections. This fault facilitates the rule of ‘the few.’ It selects its presidential candidate through an opaque process and elects its leaders at its triennial congresses by a quaintly anachronistic method devised by the Bolshevik Communist Party of the Soviet Union – CPSU.

Party rulers are not elected ‘directly’ by members but ‘indirectly’ through a series of delegates and committees. This electoral expedient enables those deemed to be ‘dissidents’ to be excluded from office while a few compliant ones can be effortlessly and repeatedly re-elected. Rohee, for example, has been assured of re-election to the Central Committees of the PYO for the past 45 years! He was elected first to the PYO from 1967 and, afterwards, to the PPP, from 1979 and remains there.

The guarantee of a stable membership, so essential to the emergence and evolution of the political element of the ‘elected oligarchy,’ became evident during Bharrat Jagdeo’s 12-year presidency. This period saw the blatant disregard of the National Assembly, where the PPP elected a member of its Central Committee as Speaker and where it enjoyed a majority.

This was followed by the systematic subordination of the Police Force and the Public Service and the sidelining of the Guyana Public Service Union and the Guyana Trades Union Congress. The misuse of the state media for partisan political purposes and the disparagement of non-governmental organisations – such as the Guyana Human Rights Association, the Guyana Bar Association, the Guyana Press Association and the Amerindian People’s Association – were part of the campaign of vilification to discredit and diminish the influence of civil society.

The law-enforcement agencies, public service and criminal justice system having been weakened, could not cope with the eruption of criminal and other underground economic activities during the first decade of this millennium. The results are that assassinations (even of a cabinet minister) are not investigated, much less solved; culprits in executions are hardly ever brought to justice for these crimes; everyday armed robberies continue.

Narco-trafficking and contraband smuggling, most of all, corrupted law-enforcement officers and public officials. These crimes introduced serious gun-running and triggered a seven-year drug war as the death squads and phantom gangs battled for new turf. The prevailing contrived lawlessness led to the assassination of the deputy Head of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit and, most recently, the execution of Ricardo ‘Fatman’ Rodrigues and others.

The Minister of Home Affairs, strangely, in the face of the new waves of crime, failed to implement the essential elements of his own National Drug Strategy Master Plan which might have curbed narco-trafficking. He rejected British assistance in the form of the Security Sector Reform Action Plan, which could have improved the efficiency of the Police Force. He declined to investigate some of the bloodiest massacres – at Lusignan, Bartica and Lindo Creek – in this country’s criminal history!

The oligarchy, on the one hand, made up of a few high-ranking party members and some selected government officials, has been able to use its control over the law-enforcement agencies to consolidate its control of the state and concentrate more power in its hands. It can now direct state contracts into the hands of its cronies who accumulate enormous amount of wealth.

The common people, on the other hand, become poorer every year as can be seen by the growing army of addicts, beggars, destitute and homeless persons, some of them deranged by drug abuse. Guyana has become a country in which the gap between the super-rich and the ultra-poor is widening before our very eyes. It is an increasingly unequal country.

The idea that Clement Rohee can continue to be the man to be in charge of public security is wrong! The notion that this country can continue to be run by an oligarchy is wrong! The thought that at this time, one year after the PPP/C lost its majority in the National Assembly, it can continue to behave as if it were a majority and can halt the march of democracy is wrong!