–on the painful birth of a new Guyana

IT was inevitable that after almost three decades to address the massive loss of semi- skilled employment at places like the Rice Board, Transport and along the Water front belt followed by the Bauxite Industry; that when the international oil crisis of the 70s strangled nations like Guyana, and smuggling, suit-case trading supplemented incomes, and businessed like reconditioned vehicular imports became active in Guyana, that the economy had to be driven by fresh business initiatives, which were encouraged, despite internal political sabotage from the early seventies to the change of government during the latter days of the Hoyte administration.
The problems started after 1992 with the change of government. That started a process to politicise along party and ethnic lines the right to do business.
The destruction of the Public Works, the cancelling of the Guyana National Service all facilitated the destruction of standards and possibilities with the sole intention to create the political clique possession of the resources of the state, clueless and careless that the result would be, the creation of a vast vacuum of hopelessness in the face of a doppelganger mimic society.

That vacuum was filled by the creeping marijuana then cocaine trade as the suitcase traders vanished. The drug trade initially was aimed at overseas, but as the wisdom of the proverb warned us, “Yuh can’t guh crab dance and nah get mud”. Thus the drugs inevitably planted its destruction in our streets and villages, and not to forget the “Back-Track” cartel of a select few.
Loss of legitimate jobs, working systems and a sincere political philosophy after 1992 were replaced with illegitimate hustles, obviously leading to a larger prison population, and quickly so, under the last administration, the seeds they had planted propelled and doubled and took on an escalating trend of mass criminality of fatal violence, traumatising and applying a severe ruthlessness, invoking a macabre trade of conspicuous extravagance at the price of all social conscience, resulting in the decline in the value of human life as a nationwide propensity.
To state that Royden ‘Smallie’ Williams is the mastermind of the Camp Street destruction in the media is either evident of cluelessness, or intended to placate and keep the incident within a comfortable environment of awareness.
Then ‘Fineman Rawlings’ was the mastermind of the commando attack against Bartica, and Satyadeow Sawh’s murder that resulted in so much intensity to have gang member ‘Biscuit’ poisoned upon the inclination that he was willing to purge his conscience.
The same happened to Christopher ‘Ninety’ St Hill who was executed a week after Ronald Waddell was assassinated upon his whispers of dissent about who was really behind it .

RECENT UPHEAVAL
This recent prison upheaval is based on the same formula as the jail-break in 2002. Whether a career criminal, or like Linden ‘Blackie’ London who applied his skills in the service of both business and political criminal covert missions to become today’s tool to be disposed of tomorrow, the philosophy about the uses of the Lumpenproletariat remains the same. And worse, more so, when the secret element of race and belief dogma is directing the music of the flute towards the self-serving quest to preserve ill-gotten territory, the masterminds can achieve the probable average of between 15 to 25% of success before the disposables fade away.

True, the prison was vulnerable, understaffed, over populated; its inmates drowned in ‘Hemp-Hashish-marijuana’, natural and synthetic, an implosion had to be expected.
But do not narrow what transpired on Sunday, July 9 as the master-stroke of Royden Williams. Though of opposite gravities, the same error was erroneously attributed to Ronald Waddell over his position concerning his involvement with the armed young men, after the 2002 jailbreak that evolved onto the peripheries of an insurrection that became centred in the Buxton backlands.
I conducted an art class in the prisons in 1996-7, and prisoners were whispering of authorities who were giving them quotas of merchandise to sell, including marijuana. I did contain that information, but remain focused on my mission, which, however, due to the classes with its limitations, was able to gain five traceable success stories.
The difference with this recent jailbreak is that no absolute high-accommodating authority, save finances and those who have benefitted from those immense finances, is its patron.
Guyana, like every other country, has had its fair share of business and domestic assassins, political-ethnic hate crimes, and opportunistic vendetta murders. The pre-independence story is saturated with such scenarios and acts.
But nothing since the 1840s is dwarfed by the period between the years 1996 to 2010. This period produced the casual ease through which a businessman can enter a south Georgetown district of struggling citizens and obtain assassins who are provided with weapons by a publicly mentioned political-criminal business class thug, who incidentally was a former policeman.

The deed was done, the assassins arrested, but the masterminds were never charged. Other cases mirror this one, in the past and present.
It cannot escape anyone who pays close attention to our modern social history that every time a particular political management attains power that the shroud of unprecedented violence and fear becomes evident.
The current political administration is the first effort to address the masterminds of malevolent mischief that has paved the way for the creation of assassin employment at the vulnerable impoverished grass-root level. The fuel of this problem rests with the amassing of immense illegal wealth through which desperate needs can be exploited, and the creation of mercenary souls achieved. The escapees must be captured ALIVE, and persuaded to assist in documenting the July 9, 2017 jailbreak and conflagration as much as they were allowed to know.