What, on Sunday, amounted to a decidedly embarrassing episode in the process of the staging of a public event executed under the patronage of the President, was as much a function of the seeming indifference that has attended the official approach to the enforcement of the protocols associated with seeking to guard against the worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it was a manifestation of the widespread and now seemingly out of control public indifference to those protocols.
It should never have happened and the irony is, President Ali’s expressed consternation notwithstanding, much of the responsibility for the occurrence must go beyond the organizers of the event and placed at the feet of elements within his administration responsible for guarding against that type of occurrence.
Where, one might ask, were the procedural routines that customarily attend public events where the Head of State is expected to be present (the President was actually the Patron of the Tournament) and which, ought to have ‘covered’ the matter of the rigid enforcement of the COVID-19 protocols as a prerequisite for attendance at Sunday’s event in the first place? And while it seems that the organizers of the event were the ones taken to task by the President over the inexcusable faux pas, it is of the Ministry of Sport and President Ali’s protocol retinue that the searching questions must be asked. After all, this was not just a matter of putting in place the comfort-related requisites to which he is, as Head of State, entitled, but also, a matter covering the ‘angles’ that had to do with his security and good health. The requisite officials should have, in the prevailing circumstances, ‘walked the ground’ long prior to the President’s arrival at Everest; so that, without question, the state institutions and functionaries responsible for those arrangements ought, surely, to be made to shoulder a great deal of the responsibility for what happened.
What happened on Sunday at the Everest Club, of course, was, additionally, a microcosm of a wider and now seemingly out-of-control national indifference to the strictures associated with seeking, hopefully, to roll back the impact of the pandemic. Increasingly, we are witnessing manifestations of what now appears to be an enormous appetite for the downright unlawful and reckless in several spheres of our existence. Here, the fault lies, first, in what, sometimes, is a sad absence of good example at levels where better should be expected (and here one cannot help but draw attention to some of the goings on in the National Assembly during the sessions that had to do with the debating and passage of the 2021 Budget). There is also the issue of effective rule enforcement. That in several areas of society is patently lacking.
Effective enforcement and leadership by example are critical to ensuring that we do the best we can to protect ourselves against a pandemic that continues to show no sign of relenting. Here in Guyana there now appears to exist a growing view that the extent of the COVID-19 affliction could well be worse than we think, given the fact that information placed in the public domain on matters of affliction and deaths is strictly limited.
It goes further. What occurred at the Everest Cricket Club on Sunday was probably not altogether unsurprising. What the authorities have failed to do during the period of the pandemic is to match the threat level associated with the pandemic with the commensurate level of rigidity in the application of the requisite protocols. One continues to get a sense of an enduring weakness in enforcement as manifested in what appears to be a combination of indifference and material limitations on the part of law enforcement.
It is the transgressors rather than the enforcers of the protocols that continue to up the ante when it really should be the other way around. When, for example, there are communities across coastal Guyana (the East Coast Demerara is one of the best examples of this) where some of the more blatant transgressions of the curfews and public assembly-related protocols occur on a daily/nightly basis and where Police Stations are literally a matter of a few minutes away, serious questions arise as to just how mindful we are about living within the limits of the protocols or about enforcing these. And why, one might ask, does it so often appear that even when there are police patrols in evidence, some of these appear to proceed with a distinct measure of indifference to their mission of suppressing the transgression of the protocols?
Beyond that, there is, what often appears to be the arrogance of the perceived privileged…like the shameful verbal attack several weeks ago on the COVID-19 Task Force by the Private Sector Commission, an attack that was as absurd as it was unwarranted, one that went (as far as we are aware) without any subsequent apology from the PSC and one which, it would appear, government allowed to let pass without engaging the PSC on its outrageous indiscretion. That occurrence seemed to be connected to a view that appears to exist in some quarters to the effect that where the protocols associated with the opening and closing times for entertainment houses are concerned, some establishments are, quite simply, above the law. There is, as well, the impression one gets, that the authorities themselves show no real inclination to push back against these absurd anomalies.
To return to President Ali’s Sunday walkout from the Everest Cricket Club a key question – which the authorities are yet to answer – arises. Where was the Minister responsible for Sport when all this was happening? Shouldn’t the event, staged as it was under the patronage of the Head of State, have been specifically targeted for enforcement of the COVID-19 protocols and shouldn’t that enforcement have been applied with particular rigorousness on Sunday evening when, presumably, both the Ministry of Sport and the Organizers would have been aware that the President was going to be there? Perhaps more to the point, given what we know to be the high infection rate associated with COVID-19, should the state machinery not have been treating with the risk of the President’s exposure to the virus with a much greater measure of seriousness?
