By Ruel Johnson
“The mind swings inward on itself in fear
Swayed towards nausea from each normal sign.
Heredity of cruelty everywhere,

And everywhere the frocks of summer torn,
The long look back to see where choice is born,
As summer grass sways to the scythe’s design.”

(Derek Walcott, A Lesson For This Sunday)
It is February, 1996. It is a cool weekend at the Golden Grove campus at President’s College. A small group of us are huddled in a classroom in the second teaching block as a hunched, shuffling yet still magisterial figure uses a stiffly held long rule to point to words on the blackboard. That figure is Disney Chichester, principal at PC, who has decided to take that year’s 5th form CXC Spanish class in hand and volunteer his time over the weekends to teach us. Usually, after class, there would be two young people waiting for him, a buxom girl in sixth form and a shy, chubby, awkward third form boy, both his children. I passed Spanish with a

distinction, as did most of the class with the exception, I recall, of one hopeless girl.

It is 2002, the month I forget. My brother and I are in Game Express, the old location further down North Road than where it is today. In the middle of a game of Mortal Kombat, there is a scuffle and I barely saw the glint of a barrel before I panicked and scaled a fence into a nearby yard. The young man with the gun leaned over and tried to locate me in the darkness but I kept low. I called my father, waited a few minutes until I heard the shop stirring to life again and go check on my brother.

It is November, 2008. I am recently divorced with a five year old son. I opened the paper and in a story about a shootout at Cromarty, Berbice, between the police and pirates, one of the dead criminals’ face looks vaguely familiar. I looked closely and it is the shy, chubby, awkward son of Disney Chichester, a boy whose name I never knew was Cliff until I saw it in black and white here in a story about him being a pirate and(being) shot and killed in a shootout at Cromarty that took the life of Detective Constable 18682 Travis Glasgow of Fyrish, Corentyne.

Cliff Chichester had at some point over the years become a cadet officer before turning to a life of crime. By now, his father had left President’s College for Mae’s and when those of us who studied under him tried to talk about what happened and imagined how he would be feeling, words and imagination failed. Disney Chichester will die a few years later and it is not hard to believe that he went to his grave with this pall, this shroud of inconsolable grief hanging over his hunched, stiff shoulders.

National scandals
It is December, 2014. I’ve recently returned from a trip to Europe and landed right in the midst of two national scandals. The first is the recording of then Attorney-General, Anil Nandlall, communicating a thinly veiled threat against the publisher of Kaieteur News, Glen Lall, to one of Lall’s senior staff, reporter Leonard Gildharie. The second is a beleaguered President Donald Ramotar, unwilling and unable to defend his record, indecently choosing to prorogue Parliament instead of facing a no-confidence vote by the then combined parliamentary opposition.

It has been a poor year for democracy and rule of law in Guyana – only a few months earlier, as the clamour for local government elections had reached a crescendo, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand had delivered her infamous feral blast against the American Ambassador; said blast we were told by the coiner of the phrase, Dr. Roger Luncheon, having had the full support of government. Earlier in the month, even national business scion Yesu Persaud had had enough, pointing out at a public forum that the PPP targets critics and while we appear to be free, we are still in chains.

This particular week in December however, it isn’t Anil, or Donald, or Priya, or Roger that has social media aghast and abuzz – it’s a young man whose name will be forgotten long before the flesh falls away from his bones. That name is Mahendra Sukull, a 24-year-old graduate from the University of Guyana, and resident of upscale community Prashad Nagar, killed in a shootout with the police after robbing a supermarket. Although Sukull’s accomplice, Warren Blue – a former policeman fingered in the extra-judicial murder of Agricola teenage, Shaquille Grant – is the one with the controversial past, the lion’s share of attention is paid to Sukull. How could such a promising young man be involved in a life of crime? I am one of the few people to ponder the same about Blue, who grew up in Tucville and who I knew as a shyer teenager than Cliff Chichester had ever been.

It is July 4, 2017. My ex-wife calls and begins to speak to me in the voice that I know all too well, the voice that tries to project reason but which barely hides the panic roiling just beneath the surface. Our son is now thirteen, roughly the age Cliff Chichester was during his father’s Spanish lessons over two decades ago. He is with me this week and is wavering between sullen, gruff teenager listening to trap music all afternoon on his headphones and the calm, dutiful boy who makes me breakfast because my leg is injured and who explains to me about the book he is reading. Over the weekend he went to a school fair, called me three minutes before his 9 pm curfew to ask for a half-hour extension, but comes home at 10 pm.

Indecently corrupt
Now, his mother’s ‘reasonable’ voice finally gives way to the source of the panic behind and beneath it. She is shocked by the news of the otherwise respectable, well-employed young men involved in Tuesday’s daring but ultimately botched bank robbery. The fear in her voice becomes increasingly audible, palpable. After we’re done talking, I call my son in and talk straight and hard to him. I make it clear that my job is to give him the opportunities I never had, both those that I missed because I grew up in a lower working class community called Tucville Terrace, and those that were deliberately denied me because I decided to take a stand against a system that was increasingly, unapologetically, indecently corrupt. Halfway into the talk I realized that his mother’s irrational fear has also, unreasonably, become mine.

It is my turn to cook dinner and when it’s done we eat and go to bed. As he sleeps, I go on Facebook and start scanning the page of Elton Wray, the former China scholarship recipient and NAREI worker, a young man who, at 25, made a salary almost as high as mine and who bought with his duty free concession the same model of car, a Nissan Juke, that I intend to buy. The picture that emerges from the posts on his wall is of an intelligent young man with a sense of how unjust life can be, a keen grasp of international issues, a passion for basketball, friends from around the world. There is no indication of any criminal bent, no glorification of violence or theft or the hustle.

It’s absurd that I should feel I have to say this, but I am no fan of armed robbery. Outside of the incident with me and my brother at Game Express so many years ago, my father has survived two violent hijackings as a taxi driver including one where he barely dodged a bullet by inches. Almost exactly four years ago, my youngest brother went to a simple trip to the shop, had a gun pointed at him, and saw a man shot to death feet from his face. I’ve seen too many young men from my old neighbourhood, Tucville and Guyhoc, turn to the gun and end up in jail or dead, including a young man shot to death by the police while hiding in a water tank two years ago.

There is a great deal of supposed puzzlement going on in the wake of the recent robbery. As with Sukull, the questions about higher education and the moral clarity that supposedly comes with that higher education abound. So do the hardline “Kill them all, they made their choice” as espoused by former state legal aid attorney, Jaya Manickchand a few years ago when the police rounded up a couple of young men, none angels, from Albouystown and killed them based upon supposed information that they were about to commit a crime.

Roger Khan factor
My take on the latest incident is that it wasn’t about poverty, it wasn’t about need – it was a manifestation of a culture of greed, of entitlement, of impunity, of excess, of inequity. And this isn’t a culture that developed overnight. It has been slowly metastasizing upon this society for the past ten or fifteen years, reaching the viral zenith of its initial infection in 2006 when Roger Khan took out an advertisement in the state paper claiming among other things that, “During the crime spree in 2002, I worked closely with the crime-fighting sections of the Guyana Police Force and provided them with assistance and information at my own expense.”

The era that has followed that statement was one that was not as turbulent in societal violence as the previous years, but one in which we would settle into a compromised calm, one where Gail Teixeira went from warning publicly against the increasing integration of drug barons into society to “Advisor on Governance” in an environment in which that phenomenon became normalised, as evidenced by the massive drug busts external to Guyana and the lack of any significant prosecution here. From that time to now, we have seen the undermining of both law enforcement and the military; a hamstrung and often complicit judicial system; the twin evils of nepotism and discrimination, the latter often in its most insidious form, racism; and unbridled corruption without consequence.

Those were the things that were instrumental in defining the environment we are in today, and to reverse that, there are four issues that need to be explored. The first is structural inequity. This is a given in any society that has been defined by ethnic and political hegemony. We live in a place in which there has been a deliberate dwarfism of some sectors and communities, while there has been a cultivated gigantism of others. I, for example, work for a very decent salary and in a good position and technically should have no complaints. However, the job I am doing now is one I was easily competent to undertake six years ago, during which time I’ve been virtually homeless, broke, hungry and vilified as a direct result of government targeting. Discriminatory practices might have significantly diminished now, but the public service is full with people who have had to accept this structural inequity with no small amount of resentment. And this does not address inequity’s more nebulous, yet more potent manifestations within the private sector.

The second is rule of law. The energies expended by SOCU and SARU notwithstanding, two years into the current administration and we’ve had no significant, successful prosecution of anyone senior from the former administration for corruption. Anil Nandlall’s entitlement of law books being currently the most prominent case involving a leading functionary of a government that took us to the lowest depths of the Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index and held us there for a decade is a far greater indictment of our priorities on corruption than it will ever be an indictment of Nandlall.

The third is governance. It is a good step to see that the government has finally decided to table a “Constitutional Reform and Consultative Bill”, the first step in what should be a much needed re-engineering of governance structures, particularly in light of the deconstruction of existing ones as summarised above. Without this shift in governance, as executed primarily through constitution reform, we cannot sustainably and comprehensively address the issues of structural inequity and rule of law.

Complex culture
The fourth, and most complex and most difficult to address, is culture. The thing about corruption is that if properly mitigated, it stays primarily a law enforcement issue. However, if allowed to spread as it has in our society, it acquires socio-cultural dimensions that exponentially limit law enforcement options, and in doing so further ensures its own necrotic growth. Add, pre-existing sociopolitical realities and what you have is a culture of dysfunction within which we wean our young people, and based upon which they make their moral choices.

This society was shocked a few months ago when gold dealer Saddiqi ‘Bobby’ Rasul was arrested for defrauding a bank of almost a billion dollars. Caught up in this imbroglio were at least one senior bank employee and several state sector officials, one of them a good friend of mine. While there are no questions in Saddiqi’s case about why a young man would aim for that level of criminality, and while the subtext was that he had to be pretty smart to pull off that hustle, he and Wray are products of the same environment – one chose a gun, the other chose the intricacies of a rigged system.

Both were would-be bank robbers. We need to erase the culture that taught both that criminal behavior is a prerequisite for wealth acquisition, the same culture that absurdly also ignores or even praises the one but outright condemns the other. In some societies, China for example, both would have been liable, upon conviction, for execution; in others, both would be eligible, upon prosecution within a fair and just system, for rehabilitative intervention.

Chichester, Sukull, Wray. Young men who all died roughly at the same age although years apart, who made a choice, yes, but seeing how this society is set up, it was in many ways a glorified Hobson’s choice. There are no contemporary rags to riches by your bootstraps examples to follow, no paragons of success and virtue and hard work. For every Yesu Persaud – and there is left to us only one Yesu Persaud – there are a hundred smaller versions of Saddiqi Rasul infesting this society, operating with impunity with little or no consequence and a surfeit of ill-acquired wealth. Our children are being brought up in a culture in which the odds are that there are more rewards for corruption and criminal behavior than there are consequences. And that is the core problem.

I’ve blamed the contemporary ethos primarily on the contemporary People’s Progressive Party, not the party of moral force of Cheddi Jagan, but that of the corruption with impunity of his successor, Bharrat Jagdeo, the most shining example of wealth acquisition through a corrupt system. That assignment of blame is not meant to be corrective or even palliative, purely diagnostic – I don’t believe you can cure a disease by holding a mirror to its primary agent’s face. What we as a society need to acknowledge is that it is our disease now. As Havel said of his own society, “None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.” Or to quote the always apt but perhaps by now over-quoted Carter, “All are involved, all are consumed.”

Contentment
Responsibility for curing that disease rests upon all our shoulders. It rests upon the shoulders of an executive government that needs to set an example of ‘contentment’ in the exercise of civic duty by not tarnishing itself with ill-timed salary increases and excessive entitlements like half-million dollar housing allowances, even as it creates programmes in education, public security, economic growth and social services that comprehensively target where we are weakest, not focusing on easy gains and political expedience; it rests upon a civil society that has been too compromised and timid to meaningfully organize to constantly monitor the social contract on behalf of constituent citizens; it rests upon a media that is content with a shrill sensationalism instead of digging deep beneath the surface of the basic story; it rests upon parents many of whom are so infected by this culture, or so beaten down by it, that they have no real lessons to offer their children about moral choices; and of course it rests upon the individual, particularly our young people, to recognise that this culture has no sustainable future, and to resist the short term lure in favour of more lasting growth and fulfillment, and a sense of active citizenship that seeks to deconstruct injustice and inequality for the greater common good.

Unless something groundbreaking and significant is done about inequity, about meaningfully tackling corruption with tangible results at all strata, about poorly capped and controlled entitlements, about judicial and constitutional reform, the current culture will continue to calcify and spread. And ever so often, we’re going to find ourselves in the midst of this furious farce, this melodramatic performance of pretending to genuinely wonder why so many of our young people are choosing the bad life as their best viable option to get to the good life that they see so many others in this society enjoying.

It is July 5, 2017. My son has just left for school and I finally close off this column I’ve been working on all night. I recall reading several places that Elton Wray’s father is a good man, a senior immigration official. I return to social media just in time to see one of my Facebook friends has changed his picture to that of the dead young man and it dawns upon me that this is the father and he and I have been friends on the network for the past two years. I think of Disney Chichester who sacrificed his weekends to educate us while a shy, chubby, young boy waited for him. I resolve to do the best I can to make a change, as an individual, as a parent and as a citizen.