A horrendous accident took place two days ago when two vehicles crashed on the Friendship public road on the East Bank. This is undoubtedly tragic, but considering the unsavoury reputation of Guyana’s roadways, under normal circumstances it would unfortunately be regarded as not that unusual. The two features, however, which singled it out were firstly, that it involved the Joint Services, and secondly, that as many as five people sadly lost their lives when there was no minibus involved.
While the police car was on official business, the other vehicle was not; it was being driven by a member of the GDF who was on his way home from work and was giving a lift to members of his family whom he had seen waiting for transportation on the roadside. As already mentioned, fatalities on the country’s highways are not all that uncommon, and it would hardly be expected that the President would respond to every one which occurred. But on this occasion, he reacted with unaccustomed dispatch, announcing the setting up of a Commission of Inquiry into the cause of the accident.
According to a statement issued by the Ministry of the Presidency, President Granger said the “shocking event will be thoroughly investigated.” He furthermore let it be known that within two hours of the accident having happened, he had directed acting Commissioner of Police Nigel Hoppie to launch an inquiry headed by an officer no lower in rank than a Deputy Commissioner, “to determine how such an accident could have occurred and also to make recommendations to prevent a recurrence.”
He was also quoted as telling the public, “We will ensure that, if there was any error, any mistake, any wrongdoing … there will be no further event like this in the history of the Police Force or the Guyana Defence Force.” We reported him as going on to say that whatever the cause of the accident, the Government of Guyana, the administrations of the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force, the Cabinet and the National Security Committee would take every step to ensure that the roads were used safely by all members of the security forces.
And as a further insurance against a recurrence, the President said that steps would also be taken to make certain that regulations, Standard Operating Procedures, inspections and measures relating to the careful selection and training of drivers were put in place. “The Government and the security forces will ensure that the findings and recommendations of this Commission of Inquiry are fully and rigorously implemented,” he was quoted as saying.
It might be mentioned en passant that implementing the recommendations of Commissions of Inquiry is not something which can be relied upon in this country, but that is another matter. Where the regulations, Standard Operating Procedures and similar issues are concerned, one cannot think that these are not in place already in the security services, and have been for a very long time. It is easy to believe that they are not being enforced, particularly in the Police Force, whose structural coherence has been subject to attenuation over the recent decades, but the assertion that the institution lacks the requisite rules and guidelines referred to by the President, stretches credulity.
And then there is the matter of the causes of the crash. One suspects that these will not be unique to this particular accident, but will fall within the pattern for road accidents as a whole. Every year the police publish statistics on this subject, in addition to listing the main causes. Sometimes, of course, accidents, fatal or otherwise, will have multiple causes, but in a general sense heading the list is invariably speeding. And in this particular case it might not be as difficult as it sometimes is to establish the sequence of events, since there is surveillance video of the crash in existence, and an accurate account is not dependent on eyewitness reports alone.
The video was posted on Facebook, and as we reported it shows the police vehicle moving at a fast rate with sirens blaring and lights flashing. The vehicle driven by the GDF member was travelling in the opposite direction, and just prior to the collision, he applied the brakes and slowed down in his lane. The two cars, however, still collided with catastrophic results, and both drivers died at the scene. Whether the implication of this is that the police vehicle was out of its lane at the time of making contact with the GDF car is something only an accident investigator could determine with any confidence.
The point is, however, this still does not need anything as elaborate as a Commission of Inquiry to establish the truth of what transpired. Neither, it must be said, is such a commission the route to ensuring that the rules and protocols pertaining to driving and drivers in the Joint Services are enforced; in hierarchical bodies such as the army and police, that depends on the senior officer corps monitoring those under their command, and applying sanctions where appropriate.
It seems it has taken a major tragedy to attract the President’s attention to a problem which has long existed; after all, as we reported, the public has been complaining for years about reckless and aggressive driving on the roadways by members of the Joint Services. Apart from the fact this suggests that nobody at the upper levels of those services appears to have bothered too much about making sure the regulations, etc, are adhered to, it also evinces a certain arrogance that their members should not be required to observe the same highway code as the ordinary citizen.
There will be emergencies of one kind or another which may require that the speed limit, for example, will have to be broken by members of the Police Force, say. However, there will be protocols about the circumstances under which that can occur. What one suspects may be happening is that the police in any given vehicle define any duty which requires them to drive anywhere as an emergency. Alternatively, while they may not do that all the time, it could be that sometimes in good faith they speed on occasions which they have inaccurately categorised as an emergency.
There have been questions raised about what duty the police vehicle involved was engaged in, since suspicions have been expressed that it was on its way to join the presidential convoy escorting President Granger from Pearl Village. While the Commander of Region Four has confirmed that the car was on official duty, he had nothing to say on its destination. The Police Force itself in a statement said that “contrary to reports in sections of the media, the police vehicle involved in the accident was not escorting His Excellency … at the time of the accident.”
No one has suggested that it was doing so at the time of the accident, merely that it was on its way to undertake escort duties. It may be that if this were the case, the occupants thought that arriving there in time constituted an emergency. It may be too, that if this were the case President Granger has a personal interest in the matter and is anxious to ensure that a thorough investigation is undertaken. However, as said before, he can have that at the senior level at which he wants without a Commission of Inquiry.
President Granger has shown a predilection for setting up Commissions of Inquiry unmatched by any other head of state. Normally, although not always, these are reserved for serious matters requiring in-depth investigation, rather than for single incidents which do not have larger ramifications and which can be dealt with perhaps more effectively at a less complex level. It is not even as if some of those he has established in the past produced any result, as in the case of the prison disturbances when the first was followed by the burning down of the Camp Street jail a year later, and then a second one had to be set up. There is too the one on education which has produced no result at all, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, and various others which were not acted on.
The anguished relatives of those who died, in addition to the two people who were injured, deserve to learn the truth of what happened at Friendship. It is just that a Commission of Inquiry is a very cumbersome method of achieving that end.
