Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee and Alliance for Change party leader and public safety spokesman Mr Raphael Trotman have taken the debate on security sector reform out of the National Assembly and onto the pages of the Stabroek News.
The public debate has enabled citizens to determine whether the road map that was charted twenty months ago in August 2007 when Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon and British High Commissioner Mr Fraser Wheeler signed the Guyana-Britain Interim Memorandum of Understanding for the Security Sector Reform Action Plan is being heeded.
The debate also allows the public to judge whether the administration’s performance has measured up to its obligations under the reform plan. Everyone can readily understand why gun crimes − such as the shooting of Commissioner of Insurance Maria van Beek, the robbery-assault on Magistrate Nigel Hawke and other everyday armed robberies − persist.
The interim MOU required the Guyana Government to seek the National Assembly’s approval for the plan and to establish special select committees to review annual reports on the implementation of the plan and to re-examine the Disciplined Forces Commission report, among other things. The plan aimed also at creating substantial parliamentary and other oversight of the security sector and building greater public participation and inclusiveness in security sector issues. The British Government has fulfilled its obligations to provide training and equipment.
Mr Trotman told this newspaper that the parliamentary committee established to monitor the plan’s implementation met only once and that was to elect a chairman. In addition, the committee received no reports on the implementation of the plan and the oversight mechanisms were not yet in place. As a result, security sector reform was “moving at a snail’s pace.”
Mr Rohee did not attempt to refute these facts. He chose to argue instead that the rate of security sector reform should not be measured solely by the Guyana-Britain Security Sector Reform Action Plan as this would ignore the contribution of the administration and other external stakeholders and the “successes” of the security services in respect of several crimes. To prove his case, he provided a table of just 12 cases, suggesting the “successful” arrest or killing of culprits over a six-month period. This invited Trotman’s riposte that a record of 12 “successes” compared to hundreds of unsolved crimes was nothing to boast about.
Repartee apart, both Rohee and Trotman failed to calculate cost and consequence of procrastination in the plan’s implementation. It should be evident that the longer it takes to reform the Guyana Police Force, the longer it will take to build a viable crime intelligence capacity to identify the emergence of new gangs, detect crimes and forestall future armed assaults. Hence, the failure to reform the police force has been partly responsible for the bewildering persistence of gun crimes. Further, delaying or derailing this ‘interim’ plan will dislodge subsequent, more substantial, phases of security reform. It is delusory to think that there can be magical long-term public safety improvement without long-term security sector reform.
Both also failed to point out that a contributory factor is that Prime Minister Samuel Hinds is chairing the parliamentary process. In addition to his weighty ministerial portfolio, he performs the duties of the president who is frequently out of the country nowadays. Mr Hinds’s busy schedule leaves insufficient time for the day-to-day direction of the reform process. As a result, the road map’s timetable has been retarded.
When it was launched in 2007, Mr Rohee promised that the plan would not be about talking, but rather of acting and “It will not be business as usual.” It seems that he was mistaken.
