Kellawan Lall incident
The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) says that to all appearances members of the PPP/C and government are “above the law and their lawless behaviour is condoned by no less a person than President (Bharrat) Jagdeo.”
According to the party in a press release on Friday, the latest example of this can be found in President Jagdeo’s reported refusal to request the resignation of or to dismiss Minister Kellawan Lall for what the party described as “the dangerous and lawless behaviour in the incident between him and Joseph Doodnauth on November 18.”
“In any society where decency is an expected standard of behaviour, any high governmental official against whom such a serious allegation has been made would demit office or be removed in order to facilitate an investigation.”
Not so in a Guyana governed by the PPP/C, the WPA remarked, as the “records will show that several examples of this, including the notorious Gajraj affair, exist.”
The WPA said that Guyanese must now focus on what the party said was the “contradictory behaviour” by the head of state in relation to gun crimes that are causing havoc and grief in this country and the reasons why the Guyana Police Force is impotent to act when serious violations of the law are committed by members of the ruling party and government.
Local Government Minister Lall allegedly gun-butted 19-year-old Doodnauth and then fired his gun in the air several times following a drunken brawl at an East Coast Demerara bar.
The gun-toting minister shares a relationship with the teenager’s aunt and may have mistaken Doodnauth for a rival, while at a barbecue event at Vryheid’s Lust, ECD. This led to the government official allegedly slamming the young man in the forehead with his firearm and later on the road driving his vehicle close to Doodnauth and jamming him, following which he fired his weapon in the air.
Since then President Jagdeo has resisted calls by the opposition to sack Lall. Jagdeo has also declared that he would not ask Lall to step aside to facilitate an investigation, as the minister was not in the way.
What is even more appalling, the WPA contended, is that even while Jagdeo is swearing zero tolerance against gun crimes, this “latest episode in a long list of interventions on the side of political cronies sends the signal that gun crimes are unacceptable by the government only if they are committed by certain people.”
The WPA declared that it is very clear that the “hands of the acting Commissioner of Police and the Guyana Police Force are tied and that they do not and cannot display the same zealousness against members of the ruling party as they do against Buxtonians and other citizens not protected by the shield of the rulers.”
This attitude, the WPA argued, only serves to underscore “people’s perception of a two-faced response by the police to crime in Guyana which allows members of the Force to harass and execute some but never to touch others.”
“The list of untouchables is long and growing longer,” the party asserted.
It said also that because of the serious implications that President Jagdeo’s latest “irresponsible utterances have for Guyana, the time has come for Guyanese and their organizations to join together and take the necessary actions to bring the Jagdeo government under control.” The party said that the alternative is “to continue on the slippery slope to anarchy and mayhem”.
