The torrent of adulation in the funerary rites last August called attention to the way in which paranoid politics peaked during the PPP’s twenty-three-year regime and gravely damaged public security. Blame for the ‘Troubles’ was laid firmly on the funeral pyre of a single, self-described ‘governmentalist’ who accumulated abnormal authority and, like the biblical scapegoat, has “taken his secrets to the grave”. Blame was also cast collectively on traitors – the “leadership of the Guyana Defence Force” which was “vested by our Constitution and laws…did not do their job” and who were “disloyal to the government of the day”.
Former President David Granger, speaking on his weekly programme – the Public Interest – examined the use of the term ‘governmentalist’ in the context of the ‘Troubles’ as the theory and tendency to extend the sphere of central government activity to an extreme degree. This was the ideology of the PPP which held office throughout the ‘Troubles’, the decade when the worst criminal violence since Independence occurred.
The People’s Progressive Party − an unapologetic ‘Leninist’ party − embraced a form of exclusionary governance and fell increasingly under the influence of ideologues of the People’s Friendship University of Russia who eventually displaced the ‘Civic’ component. The PPP concentrated excessive administrative authority in the hands of one man – as Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Secretary of the Cabinet, Secretary of the Defence Board, Chairman of the National Insurance Scheme, Chairman of the Civil Defence Commission, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Secretary of the National Drug Law Enforcement Committee.
Governability, however, explains that, as the extent of problems increased, the capacity to solve them decreased. Government became ineffective owing to the intractability of issues and inability to secure compliance in a system unsuited to unchallenged, centralised authority but, rather, cooperation between competing groups. As public order deteriorated, the HPS requested to be relieved of his crippling responsibilities – as Chief negotiator after the collapse of the SSRAP, as Chairman of CDC, after the 2005 flood catastrophe; and as Chairman of the NIS, after the investment fiasco – which were refused.
Mr. Granger showed how public security during the ‘Troubles’ was damaged by the demoralisation of the Defence Force with the interdiction of Deputy Chief of Staff and the expulsion of six other colonels, and of the Police Force with the excessive extension of Commissioners’ tenure and employment of rogue officers; by discarding the National Drug Strategy Master Plan, the Report of the Disciplined Forces Commission, the UK-funded Security Sector Reform Action Plan and the US State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports; by the destruction of the National Service and degradation of the People’s Militia and by resisting the establishment of a US DEA office. The US Embassy cables, however, explicitly alleged that HPS… “is known to have intervened and ordered the release and return the equipment – Cellular Protocol Analyzer model CSM 7806 manufactured by Smith-Meyers – contrary to his assurances.
The former President pointed out that past PPP administrations exercised such extreme control that the command structures of the Defence and Police Forces were undermined resulting in deadly consequences for public security. The PPP’s paranoid posture exposed its deficiencies and deceits. Press conferences degenerated into platforms for misinformation. Sadly, while the Party was lying, people were dying.
