A simple citizen has a question for Guyana’s chief man of the law, the Hon. Attorney General, Mr. Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC, MP. He is a man of the law, and of that there is no dispute, so let that be put to bed. It is an ordinary question: is Leonora in Region Three, Guyana’s version of Alabama? Not the Crimson Tide of rampaging Alabama college football achievement, but that old lawless Alabama of an era now long gone by. Well, at least, now well-bottled up underground. The Klansmen were adaptable before, so the expectation is that they are adaptable today.
Sections of the Leonora of today give every impression of having its own system of law and order. Revelries round the clock, including on days of worship. Nobody has hurled a bottle at a house of worship to date, but one citizen has not been that fortunate. He now stands victimized for daring to challenge the status quo. Also, Leonora has some peculiar strains that remind knowledgeable Guyanese of Alabama’s chief of security and domestic peace, one Bull Connor.
He was not one to see any evil, hear any evil, or speak any evil. Especially when the purity of his folk was considered. Seems like that kind of Alabama came to Leonora up until recently. That is, men with the right kind of access are a law unto themselves. There is one kind of access possible, the one that gives official people a reason to look the other way. It is called cash or help in getting rid of a stash. Don’t look over here and ask what kind of stash. It would be much more rewarding to reach out and consult with Guyana’s man of the law, Dr. Nandlall, who knows all that there is a need to know, and then some more.
The quiet recommendation is for Guyana’s supreme lawmaker and law deliverer, AG Nandlall to consent graciously to make good on his promises articulated so responsibly and nobly on some program that he has, and on which he expounds about things in Guyana. Developments that are good and bad. Mr. Nandlall doesn’t need for some peasant to inform him that what is going on in Leonora is bad. Noise pollution is bad for most residents of that once rustic Cinderella arcadia known as Leonora, except for those putting out the noise at high volumes and singing in the rain (and all hours of the dark).
This is bad for the clean image of his PPP Government. Bad for hometown hero, Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Guyana’s most exciting and effervescent head of state ever, notwithstanding the grand leadership record of that other fine president of this country, Dr. Jagdeo. Excellency Mohamed Irfaan Ali is not a stranger intruding on the way of life in Montgomery Alabama during the destructive Jim Crow decades; nor is he trying to change the way things are in some part of the Mississippi Delta. Leonora is his ground, where he used to run those once dusty streets, and villagers were a study in civility. Today, incivility and barbarity are the order of the day in a Leonora no longer benign, but brutalized night after night by the night crawlers, the night stalkers, and the night horrors that rule the roost in good old Leonora.
It has been some interval since AG Nandlall took to the airwaves and blasted off about noise nuisance and the volume of cries inundating the PPP Government’s offices. The pace of improvements has been akin to that of a snail’s crawl, one with rheumatism even in its shell and antenna. Personnel moves, official vehicular moves, an occasional visitation move, but no downward movement on the noise volume control. If anybody had said that Guyana’s attorney general was suffering from official impotence, there would have been strong objection from this section of the aisle. Who is the boss in this country? The real ones?
As AG Nandlall knows full well, the situation in Leonora is too hot for Local Government to handle; it is an issue for Guyana’s equivalent of a federal government. All fingers point to him as the go-to guy, the man with the power to get things done. He must not shrink, nor must he seek cover, from the task at hand. He could tell Bharat Jagdeo that he is better off taking his culture and feeding it to the vultures. Indeed, Guyana is a bastion of democracy, and with that comes the duty for every citizen to balance their rights with the responsibilities that go along with them. All Guyanese have rights, and it should be to the AG’s delight to set the standard of what is right and who has it wrong. What is so hard about that, Mr. Senior Counsel, Mr. parliamentary lawmaker?
Strange place is this Guyana: some in the hood turn Leonora into the rowdiness, recklessness, and lawlessness of 1960s Selma, Alabama, and Guyana’s president is the picture of untroubled serenity. No one should be playing politics at this time. Nor should anyone be protecting anybody. Nor should members of the private sector be allowed to believe that they have won some special PPP governmental dispensation to carry on as they please.
