…in the Police Force
Your Eyewitness would be foolish indeed if he were to condemn the entire Guyana Police Force. Surely, in an organisation of some 4500 men and women – who’ve literally been given the power of life and death over their fellow citizens – some of them are gonna abuse those extraordinary powers. There’s a famous experiment wherein some college students were picked for an EXPERIMENT and given the roles of guards over other students. And as “guards”, they actually tortured the “prisoners”!! Yes, we humans do tend to abuse our powers.
But because this known tendency in humans is taken a whole new level when the Police are handed real weapons – with real laws compelling folks to obey them – imagine what can happen! And in Guyana we don’t have to “imagine”, do we?? Police “harassment” has been a part and parcel of Guyanese life ever since the Police Force was formed in 1839!! It was no coincidence that this was the very next year following the abolition of slavery, was it?? Did you think they were told to “serve and protect” those folks who’d been treated like animals for the past three hundred years??
Their job was to protect the SYSTEM created by the whites who ran the system!! Up to independence, most of the officers were white!! During the CIA-inspired riots in the run-up to independence, the name of British white Police Commissioner Peter Owen struck fear in the ordinary people. And that attitude never had a chance of changing, since Burnham picked up right where the British left off!! He enlarged the Police Force, that had to be personally loyal to him. For those who didn’t wanna toe his line, their heads rolled!!
So, the natural propensity of folks to abuse their power was coupled with the free rein Burnham gave the police to harass folks who opposed him. Many policemen were even part of the “kick-down-the-door” bandit squads up to the late eighties – until Hoyte brought in his “hang-em-high” policy!!
The GPF the PPP inherited in 1992 had been corrupted through and through; but sadly, rather than immediately launching a thoroughgoing revamping and reorientation of the GPF, the PPP tried to work with the manpower they inherited. And we segued for the next twenty years of the new millennium, that saw bandits holing up in Buxton having absolutely no respect for the police, and taking them on directly.
As your Eyewitness has been emphasising, when Granger took over in 2015, he cogged wholesale from his mentor Burnham’s playbook. The top brass that the PPP had painfully built up was thrown under the bus on trumped-up accusations and were fired. Only Granger loyalists survived.
So, we gotta start from scratch again!!
…in politics
It ain’t easy being in politics in Guyana nowadays! Used to be you told folks whatever they wanted to hear – meaning promise them the sun and moon! – buy some rum in the rum shops, and give your private (racial) spiels under the bottom houses, and that was it!! Since folks voted mostly on race, it was already a foregone conclusion as to who’d win – that depended on the colour of the various noses!!
But now things are different: the noses are almost equal in number – which creates a dilemma to the old order. Suddenly, you gotta be nice to everybody, since the least misstep could cost you those crucial fence-sitting noses!! Problem is the new “bottom houses” – where folks engage in the race talk – is social media. Here, it’s a case of everything hanging out, and since the content’s available to everyone with a smartphone – meaning EVERYBODY – everyone gets riled up!!
The politicians now gotta be “outing” fires every minute of the day!!
