Dear Editor,
I read the letters by both highly respected citizens, Mr Nigel Hinds and Mr Christopher Ram, and while I agree with the fundamental thrust of what they are saying vis-à-vis the establishment of a functional human rights environment, I find their specific argument in defence of NICIL’s Mr Winston Brassington and the Guyana Revenue Authority’s Mr Khurshid Sattaur contextually flawed, particularly in the direction in which both arguments seem to be heading. In summary, Mr Hinds argues that Mr Brassington’s actions were in sum good for the country and hence he should not be ‘pilloried’ for minor excesses, while Mr Ram argues that Mr Sattaur’s sole and ultimately forgivable blunder was the revelation of confidential taxpayer information to the previous administration and hence apparent current investigations against him appear arbitrary.
While I agree completely that any action taken against an officer of the former administration has to be done within the confines of the law and a court of justice is the better arena for tangible action than the court of public opinion, both writers seem to have set out to make a case that both Brassington and Sattaur are above censure or investigative action.
In the case of Mr Ram, while he is correct that the case of professional misconduct was withdrawn against Mr Sattaur with regard to the revelation of information, he incorrectly conflates this with the presumption of a carte blanche for the longstanding head of a state agency about which questions have been raised, and one it was alleged that was used as a weapon against opponents of the former government. Mr Ram is a lawyer and while he makes an ostensibly ethical case against the seizure of Mr Sattaur’s computer and firearm from his home, he has not even attempted to argue that the actions taken by junior officers presumably under the direction of the GRA Board were in any way ultra vires.
For his part, after an extremely elegant argument on the need for national reconciliation, Mr Hinds says, in defence of Mr Brassington’s NICIL, “On the broad margins, we can scrutinize projects and privatizations that together number over two hundred and find imperfections, including preferential treatment and measures that go against the grain of good governance; however, the development of a country does not occur in a pristine vacuum.”
This is flawed logic at best; the development of a country best occurs when the sort of preferential treatment ‒ the Sanata deal for example ‒ that prevailed under the PPP is mitigated and kept to a minimum, not rationalized and glossed over. The reality is preferential treatment not only artificially amplifies the capacity of the favoured but it dwarfs the capacity of potential, often better qualified, competitors. Not only did the PPP apply preferential treatment at the large project level, but it completely undermined the public service with ‘preferential treatment’ in the form of ethnic discrimination and nepotism. Further, the preferential treatment in the granting of media licences to only people the PPP found favourable and to the PPP itself was a direct attack on the fundamental right of freedom of expression. I know of no functional best practice system, however liberal, in which this is a model of sustainable development. There are many contractors, service providers and public servants and private citizens who would disagree with Mr Hinds’ view of development. The PPP’s discriminatory practices have in fact hurt every single sector, from road construction to education to cultural development; even more so, they have taken an immeasurable toll on the lives of individual people, one than can never be repaid.
If there is a danger in the overzealous prosecution and pillory of persons like Mr Sattaur and Mr Brassington, there is a far greater danger in the failure to bring those culpable for excesses under the previous regime to justice, and in doing so deny justice to the victims of the system. What we will be saying in essence is that class and power associations are predominant factors in determining the application of the rule of law and the dispensation of justice, even as those class and power associations have been forged by the despicable foundry of ethnic politics.
Under the former administration, I wrote about the necrotic silence that was slowly creeping over this place. Now that it has been checked, we find ourselves engaged in certain quarters in a compromised conversation, one that continues to be dangerously skewed towards complete absolution of crimes in which victims were robbed of the very rights of citizenship and humanity under the PPP.
In general terms, the representation currently being made for the formerly powerful that speaks of clemency and fundamental rights cannot be absent direct representation for the voiceless that they were instrumental in suppressing.
It is well and good that we show that we are capable of clemency, but first we must tangibly demonstrate that we are capable of the delivery of justice. At this point, more than half a year into the coalition’s electoral win, we have not. There are two simple solutions available to the executive in this dilemma: the first is to let due process and the rule of law prevail, without fear or favour, and if deals are to be made, their outcome must be tangible gains in the public interest. The second is to recognize that while the law may be inadequate to the delivery of justice to many people, those who risked and sacrificed for a change in Guyana’s political leadership deserve to have their conviction vindicated in other ways, even if just to be able to voice the injustice meted out to them or have it represented with the same eloquence with which Messrs Brassington and Sattaur now find themselves represented.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
