Guyana is a country in which it is common for the powerful and the influential to cast long and unpalatable shadows. The year that ends tomorrow has seen much of that kind of behaviour by public figures, politicians, ministers of government, people with political connections and, of course, the wealthy and, by extension, influential. Some of it has occurred at the expense of the poor and the powerless. Crudely put, it is a form of behaviour which is loosely described as might is right, a facility that licences some to do as they please including break the law and thumb their noses at the consequences. It is a practice with which the citizens of this country have become particularly familiar. In some circumstances it can mean that you cross people of power and influence at your own peril.
There would have been a sobering significance to the report emanating from our Caricom sister country, Trinidad and Tobago, last week, about a senior police officer from the twin-island Republic who was unceremoniously dumped from an internal Caribbean Airlines flight following an incident that had to do with his use of his cell phone on the aircraft in contravention of airline rules. The story would certainly have done much to help the thoughtful to understand how the other half lives, so to speak, and to provide a clearer albeit disturbing perspective on our own decidedly unwholesome condition.
There appear to be several sides to Assistant Commissioner of Police Peter Reyes’s story. The Trinidad Express of December 19 says that his eviction from the fifteen-minute flight from Port of Spain to Tobago had been effected on the previous evening “when he refused to switch off his cellular telephone and became hostile when the Flight Attendant asked him several times.” The report quotes Mr Reyes as telling a most peculiar story about not knowing how to turn off his cell phone. Since one assumes that a senior police officer would be familiar with his country’s airline rules governing the use of cell phones, and assuming that he honestly didn’t know how to turn off his own cell phone, the question arises as to why he did not have it turned off before he boarded the aircraft in the first place.
One assumes that there may have been various ways of settling the matter before it actually reached the point at which Assistant Commissioner Reyes had to be thrown off the flight. For example, might it not have been entirely feasible for the Assistant Commissioner to bring the matter to a close by seeking assistance from another passenger or the Flight Attendant to turn the phone off, if, indeed, he was unable to do so himself; and would that not have more than satisfied the Flight Attendant who, at that point, would have had no reason to take the matter further?
For us in Guyana what is significant about this incident is the fact that Caribbean Airlines was able to enforce its rules even though it meant the eviction of an apparently delinquent public functionary of some stature and, presumably, influence, from one of its flights and – according to some versions of the incident – for being hostile to a member of its staff into the bargain. That, most assuredly, is unlikely to have happened in our Republic.
Assistant Commissioner Reyes must have felt more than a little humiliated to find himself dumped from the CAL flight in circumstances where what would have been his undoubted influence as a very senior police officer did not matter one iota to the staff manning the flight who were clearly in a position to enforce the regulations without fear of any ‘pulling of rank’ by the Assistant Commissioner. That is not how it works in our Republic.
Some of our own police officers – many of them even below the rank of Assistant Commissioner – are no slouches where displays of arrogance associated with a sense of being above the law is concerned. Of course, where crude and tasteless displays of power are concerned, policemen are hardly alone. Some of our own politicians, not least ministers, have distinguished themselves through various forms of unbecoming, repulsive, even dangerous behaviour while managing to avoid even the mildest of official reprimands.
It goes beyond the high-handedness of those who place their own interpretations on the functions of power. On the whole – and obviously unlike some territories even within the Caribbean Community – many, perhaps most of us in Guyana live with an overwhelming mindfulness of the seamier side of power, so that we are left with a deep and indelible circumspection about the ways in which it can be used to hurt us. In effect, we have grown accustomed to a relationship between the more and the less powerful that causes us, frequently, to subsume laws and regulations governing decency and accountability beneath what we perceive to be the prerogatives of the powerful. Once that happens we cease to be a rules-based society and live by an instinct that is based on what happens around us. It is a condition that may well have reduced us to a near Orwellian existence.
