It was always a matter of when. If was never a part of the plan. Extradition request is the issue, and the two Mohameds are the parties on the document from the US government. One has to be impressed at the near perfect timing of that request, and what means for the Mohameds, none more than the son.
In response to a US extradition request, the two Mohameds are arrested on mid Friday morning. The first question is how does an extradition request (for emphasis: request) leads to almost immediate arrest. The second is what is it based on, the indictments and charges from a U.S. Federal Court? If so, then what about all of this going through Guyana’s courts, as part of a process, be it normal or expedited? Why should something as sensitive as this extradition request for a citizen, who seems to have a lock on being Guyana’s Leader of the Opposition, be placed on an expedited footing, if such were to be the case, would be my third question? Mr. Mohamed has his options, and he has said that he is prepared to fight as hard as possible, and take matters as far as they could go. I interpret that to mean as long as it takes, also. We shall see how much of a warrior he is.
At the moment, the clock is ticking, and the Guyana Police Force has 72 hours to hold and interrogate the two Mohameds. The arrest on Friday means that the lockups now serve as the residence of the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) leader, Mr. Azruddin Mohamed until Monday, at least. And what is significant about Monday? It is November 3rd, the day when the National Assembly is reconvened. I do not think that the WIN leader will be a part of that parliamentary brigade, when the doors are flung open, the business of the Guyanese people begins. The question of who will be the new Leader of the Opposition could hang unresolved for a time. That is, unless the WIN group has a contingency for just such a development, should circumstances make them necessary. On a different note, how his folks react to this extradition request and arrest remains to be seen. If they are invisible and inaudible, it could mean much more than the party’s leader out of commission. It could signal hard, nearly insurmountable, times ahead for the WIN party itself.
Prior to all of these, what I would call, surrounding issues, the courts will most likely be approached for a decision, one way or another, on how much longer Mr. Mohamed the Younger could be kept under lock-and-key. Recall that that cannot happen until Monday. Should he be given his freedom, with tough conditions attached, then how does that play out relative to his presence in parliament could be the next challenge, the next battleground. The current placeholder and makeshift Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton said, in reaction to the extradition request and subsequent arrest of the Mohameds, that he hopes that all legal processes will be followed. Me too, if only to give whatever follows a gloss of doing everything by the book, and with both Mohameds given the fullest and fairest of due process considerations.
In sharing on these developments, I can only watch in fascination at how the world of politics turns in this country. In the beginning, the Mohameds were the crème de la crème of the political world, with courtship and friendship coming from the leading political players in this country, none more than those in the PPP. As the senior Mohamed is reported to have said, his family had a huge hand in the political success of Dr. Cheddi Jagan. Then, the political descendants of Dr. Jagan were cultivated, on the one hand, by the Mohameds; and those political operators capitalized on the relationship that become famous in this society for its intimateness. From the dizziest of heights to the most forlorn of pits has been the trajectory of the arc traveled by the two Mohameds.
Clearly, they are now on the outs, relative to the powerful political Jetstream. The question that I toy with is this: they may be on the outs, but are they down? The next few days and weeks will decide how interesting these times will be. And what more could come out of this saga of deep friendships turning into grave enmity. Without a doubt, one thing is guaranteed: it will be a circus of a spectacular kind.
