By GHK Lall- It would take an imbecile to think of Hon Minister of Home Affairs, Oneidge Walrond, as a dunce. Like a few other ministers in the PPP Govt, Minister Walrond is neither dunce nor dummy, nor ditzy, as my Jewish friends would say. But there are those two distinctive strains that connect the honorable minister to her comrades (luminous or ludicrous) in the Cabinet.
First, they display a certain fineness of feather when speeches are needed, when propaganda rules the day. In contrast, when they have to stand and face the music of hard questions that demand straight answers, they pale in fear, shrink from the light that follows, wouldn’t let them escape.
Minister Walrond stands as the newest example of this PPP Govt phenomenon. Ministers who talk a lot when the weather is pleasant; ministers who turn turtle when it’s stormy.
The minister couldn’t have asked for kinder, gentler, helpers. Two media practitioners, who tried as nursemaids and midwives. How they cared for Minister Walrond! How they tried to coddle her, calm her anxieties, guide her away from breaking out in a fit of bawling.
It didn’t work in the matter of a senior police officer (few come more senior), now alleged to have engaged in what was found undesirable, found demeaning, and was reported. Minister Waldron first tripped over her tongue, then tripped up her feet.
After a while, I couldn’t take anymore, signed off. When there’s that kind of verbal wrestling, there is pay-per-view for masked and painted gladiators making fun of the English Language, the spectators, and all that has anything to do with intelligence. For emphasis, instead of absorbing, with disbelief, Minister Walrond and what sounded like ‘formal confrontation’ for free, I prefer to spend precious coin listening to the WWE.
It didn’t help that for days, the same Minister Walrond and the Top Cop provided not one answer to questions raised in the Joint Services WhatsApp media group. Doesn’t speak well for minister of commissioner. Leaves a lingering taint, that her belated media appearance did nothing to ease.
Was the minister not a member of Guyana’s august magistracy? Whither her knowledge? Was she also not the Hon Minister of Tourism? So, what did she say to those who came to take a look at Guyana’s beauties and Guyana’s splendors? A report was filed. There is a victim. The automatic first step, therefore, had to be to give solace to the alleged victim and to move rapidly and procedurally to remove her alleged attacker from all official provinces and stations.
A matter of the routine in instances such as these. A situation that calls for the fairest play to be meted out to both the abused and the aggressor, as alleged. Moreover, given her gender, I would expect from the honorable minister that there’s empathy, there’s compassion, there’s some comprehension of the ordeal of the alleged victim, and the risk taken by filing a complaint. Perhaps, I expect too much, am just too much of an optimist in a lost land, whose biggest boast is its volume of limp.
After all the training, all the sensitizing, and all the protocols put in place, and still there was Minister Waldron picking her words so painstakingly slowly, so excruciatingly circuitously, that I thought for a moment that she was a somnambulist (sleepwalker) ghosting around and talking in the daylight. It is bewildering that PPP Govt Ministers, normally so bubbly and frothy at weddings, wakes, walkabouts, and whatnots (wads of cash) can be reduced to such hollow hulks when a truly difficult situation arises.
The senior police office is due the rights of a citizen. The alleged victim is due all those measures so grandly spoken about by Minister Vindya Persaud, if only to afford her some dignity, some regard, in her time of trauma. What good are those enhanced developments, when they disappear, do not apply, when PPP Govt favorites are involved. In past years, Guyanese have seen many friends looked out for, given that extra layer of time and a protective blanket. All is chatter. Chatter that proves idle in certain circumstances. Minister Waldron’s delayed press appearance just proved so.
