It took British High Commissioner Mr Fraser Wheeler only a year after arriving here to discover that “Guyana has a lot of strategies” for dealing with its intractable security situation. He realised, also, that what was really needed was a plan of action that could be implemented. Yet, a lot of paper strategies keep coming and practical results seem as remote as ever.
Hardly a year passes without a major visit by one UK Department for International Development-funded team of security consultants or another. In May 2002, for example, President Bharrat Jagdeo travelled to London and personally met with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to seek assistance for his counter-crime campaign. The following year, 2003, a UK Defence Advisory Team visited the country and produced a report on ways in which the capacity of the police force could be enhanced.
Back in 2004, Chief Superintendent Paul Robinson and his team actually trained 100 members of the police force’s Tactical Services Unit to become the core of this country’s Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) strike force.
In May last year, Chief Constable David Garbatt led an eight-member team of officials – representing the Scottish Police Service and the English Police Service – to study the functioning of the Guyana Police Force. In October, Professor Eboe Hutchful and Lieutenant General Vinayak Patankar led another team with a similar purpose. There has been no shortage of visits, reports, recommendations and training courses.
Now, it’s the turn of Superintendent Paul Morisetti, International Policing Advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean, and his team, to sign the police force’s visitors’ book. Mr Morisetti’s initiative – spearheaded by a task force of police officers from the National Policing Improvement Agency International Academy at Bramshill, and the Scottish Police College – is meant to implement the Security Sector Reform Action Plan and follows the signing of the Guyana-Britain security cooperation agreement last August.
At the signing, the British High Commissioner indicated that the main elements of the ambitious plan were to build the operational capacity of the police force; strengthen policy-making across the security sector; and create substantial parliamentary and other oversight of the security sector, among other things.
No one questions the efficiency and enthusiasm of the British public safety establishments which have been so frequently involved in advising and training Guyana’s police force. The international department of the Scottish Police College which provides learning and development opportunities in operational policing, police leadership and performance management, and Centrex – the trading name of the Central Police Training and Development Authority which has now been subsumed within the new National Policing Improvement Agency which has sent Mr Morisetti – must be very familiar with local police problems and personalities after all these years.
The problem is not a British one, but a Guyanese one. Sub-contracting security policy-making to various semi-detached foreign agencies seems to have become the natural response of the administration after its fifteen years in office. It must be clear to the British Government, however, that lots of agreement signing, DfID funding and technical training have not significantly improved public safety or raised the level of police performance. The Guyana Government, meanwhile, merrily promulgates programmes which it has no intention of implementing and launches new committees and consultations with no practical purpose.
The road of police reform is plastered with unimplemented consultancy reports and paved with unfulfilled expectations. Who will implement the action plan? Can the Morisetti initiative succeed where so many others have stalled?
As the British High Commissioner said of the proposed Security Sector Reform Action Plan back in August, “The important thing about this plan is that it is not just another security plan. We did not want to produce just another strategy.” The Guyanese people hope that he is right but know that they will just have to wait and see.
