An official enquiry into the Neesa Gopaul tragedy was clearly very necessary. The horror of her pain and suffering and her eventual gruesome death apart, what rendered the enquiry necessary was the extent to which public institutions and public officers appeared neglectful of their professional responsibilities. Of course, no one is on trial here. Setting aside the fact that the outcomes of the investigations by the Ministries of Human Services and Education have not been made public, charges of scapegoatism have already been made by those Queen’s College teachers who, it appears, are being required to carry the can. In a sense, the position of the teachers is not entirely surprising.
There is, however, another important side to the enquiry, per se, upon which we can comment. Once the media had made public some details of the period preceding her death, the question that surfaced and persisted was whether or not she might not have been saved had the public institutions and public officers who were aware of and active in the case behaved differently. It was what appeared to be a case of those institutions and individuals dropping the ball that compelled the investigation. The government, particularly its Human Services Minister was clearly embarrassed and that embarrassment was patently apparent in the Minister’s initial response.
What transpired thereafter may well have set an interesting precedent. Swift enquiries into perceived acts of incompetence, irregularity or impropriety by public officers are not the order of the day in Guyana. One can argue with much justification that such occurrences are, for the most part, allowed to pass quietly, or if not, investigated seemingly without any real enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of the matter and identifying and punishing the guilty parties. In some instances official approaches to handling such matters have reeked of cover-up and concealment.
Accordingly, and again without seeking to detract from the importance of having an enquiry into Neesa’s case, it comes as no surprise that the enquiry itself, in its uniqueness, is probably perceived in some quarters as intended, primarily, to assuage the government’s embarrassment in the matter. Equally significantly, we cannot be altogether surprised if the question ‘why only now’ arises. After all, there is no shortage of uninvestigated cases of actual and apparent inappropriate and illegal conduct by public institutions and public officers, and those have come and gone without anything remotely resembling an official enquiry.
If the response to this question is that the Neesa Gopaul enquiry can perhaps be seen as a signal from government that it now intends to draw a line in the sand as far the behaviour of public institutions and public officials is concerned, it is equally important that the attention of the authorities is drawn to the significance of what can perhaps be termed the Neesa Gopaul precedent. It certainly raises the issue as to whether we can expect that, in the future, cases of illegality, incompetence and unprofessional conduct in public institutions or by public officers will be investigated with a corresponding level of diligence and alacrity. This is really the critical question that the government must answer if we are to take its action in the Neesa Gopaul case seriously. In setting the precedent, the government has, we hope, committed itself to some measure of consistency not only in cases that have to do with the protection of children like Neesa, but also in those numerous cases that have to do with the protection of the state from corruption-driven plunder, which cases come and go with monotonous regularity.
Whether or not the Neesa Gopaul investigation signals the setting of a higher official benchmark for standards of professionalism and integrity among state institutions and public officers is a question to which the government alone can provide an answer. Were it to turn out that we are indeed turning a corner in terms of what we ask of our institutions and those who serve them, the decision to have an enquiry into the handling of the Neesa Gopaul case could prove to be a landmark, no less, in the quality of governance in our country. If, however, that turns out not to be the case, the enquiry could, in the future, be cited as no more than a one-off, isolated occurrence, a kind of show trial staged purely to assuage the embarrassment of the government and to serve its own face-saving ends. That would be an unpardonable injustice to Neesa’s memory.
