It has been just over a year since the political opposition passed a vote of no confidence in Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee following the shooting to death of three persons during demonstrations at Linden. The courts ruled against the political move to gag Mr Rohee and the opposition political parties have set their faces against any attempt by the Home Affairs Minister to have legislation passed in the National Assembly. The relationship between Mr Rohee and the political opposition has been both combative and counterproductive. Most recently, it has entered a phase of threatening to completely destabilize any hope of political consensus on a response to the crime situation.
Having signalled to government back in July last year that they were prepared to lock political horns over Mr Rohee, more specifically over him holding the post of Home Affairs Minister, the parliamentary opposition parties in the National Assembly sent a further signal recently that their respective positions remain unchanged.
Even making allowances for the hint of exaggeration in Opposition Leader David Granger’s description of the country’s crime situation as having gone “beyond crisis point” (the description appears to suggest that the situation can hardly become worse, which is debatable), the scale of the problem remains deeply troubling. Evidence of what frequently appear to be equal measures of indifference, incompetence and a patent lack of capacity to effectively manage its image has led to the Force being targeted for widespread public ridicule. Much of the blame – perhaps even justifiably, sometimes) has been placed at Mr Rohee’s door. Not even Mr Rohee can honestly deny that as the crime and security situation grows worse the GPF has suffered a corresponding decline in its public image. Indeed, it is, in large measure, the weaknesses of police, primarily, that have been used to measure the degree to which the security situation has worsened.
The recent disclosures to this newspaper by Mr Granger and Mr Khemraj Ramjattan, (Sunday Stabroek, August 25) therefore, would appear to be moving us further in the direction of political gridlock on the issues of crime and security.
There is no ambiguity in what Mr Granger has had to say about the political opposition collaborating with the government on issues of crime and security. It will do so only if Mr Rohee is out of the picture since it regards working with him as “a waste of time”; no mincing of words there, except, of course, that political watchers may feel that the Opposition Leader has left himself perilously little ‘wiggle room’ in the event that this is needed.
Mr Ramjattan too appears to be of the view that the political opposition is unlikely to get very far in its efforts to have the government take on board its recommendations on improving the security environment.
For his part, there has also been no lack of ambiguity in Mr Rohee’s take on the matter of who is in charge of the crime and security brief. In a recent letter to the media the Home Affairs Minister said that “Granger and his merry band” believe that “only under the PNC will the security sector improve… Regrettably, there is no one in the PPP/C who supports either the APNU or the AFC. So Rohee or no Rohee both the AFC and APNU will have to await a change in government to get their way in the security sector” ‒ no mincing of words there either.
If last year’s National Assembly no-confidence vote on Mr Rohee pretty much threw down an opposition political gauntlet, the government has responded with a corresponding measure of bullishness. President Donald Ramotar has already said that Mr Rohee is going nowhere. More than that, Mr Rohee, just over a week ago, appears to have secured himself a considerable political windfall by getting himself elected General Secretary of the ruling PPP. By making him its new General Secretary, the PPP has sent perhaps the strongest signal that it can about Mr Rohee’s standing in the party and his future in the political administration.
Combative (and controversial) politician that he is, Mr Rohee has more or less pressed ahead with what he sees as the modernization of the Guyana Police Force, political criticism notwithstanding. The most recent of these initiatives has been the creation of a Strategic Management Department (SMD) inside the Home Affairs Ministry. Its role and its work to improve the operations of the Force were made public in a recent statement issued by the Force, buttressed by an extensive report in another section of the media on the work of the SMD.
In sum, the political opposition has restated its unpreparedness to work with Mr Rohee. For his part, Mr Rohee appears quite prepared to press ahead with such ‘modernizations’ and ‘reforms’ that do not require parliamentary say so. Those are worrying signs if only for the reason that approaches to tackling crime that exclude the widest possible political and citizen stakeholder involvement and input stand very little chance of winning the kind of endorsement that they need to succeed.
