THE  currently unfolding gruesome saga linking a prominent city businessman and television personality to shocking allegations of child molestation and rape has been as horrifying as it has been riveting.

The revelations made under sworn affidavit by the alleged victim are enough to transfix any decent person with disgust and incredulity. Over and above the condemnation that is befitting of child abuse and rape in absolutely any circumstances, the current case is tragic and ironic in many other ways.

At the centre is a prominent and wealthy middle-aged person who has long paraded himself as a protector of the poor and underprivileged, but who has been accused on several occasions in the past of preying like a vulture on the very persons he has been pretending to protect.

In this instance, the victims are the most vulnerable one could imagine, teenaged and pre-teenaged daughters of an impoverished employee. The story of wealth and abuse of power, sexual perversion, predatory behaviour, and sudden display of illness and admission into hospital upon being apprehended, would outshine any televised soap opera that has ever been broadcast on the television station owned by the accused person.

Indeed, some might even argue that just as money was used by the accused to insert himself into these poor children’s lives and to overpower and exploit them, so was money used to acquire a television station, catapult himself into the public consciousness, and insert himself into the homes, lives, and opinions of an unsuspecting Guyanese public over the years.

To many, he was elderly and silver-haired, eccentric and crude in his ways, not to be taken too seriously, but instead to be regarded as a harmless buffoon providing light comic relief, interspersed with generous helpings of self-aggrandisement and political self-delusion.

However, if the allegations now being made and those of a similar nature made previously against him are to be believed, he was anything but harmless or amusing to his victims. Instead, he was an ogre of the worst kind, and a nightmare for which they could never have been prepared and from which they might never recover.

But, the saga has revealed much more than about the evil that this self-appointed purveyor of justice is being accused of doing to others. It has also revealed much about a number of other self-appointed arbiters of public morality.

Only recently, there was an instance where one embassy withdrew the visa of a person on the basis of an unsubstantiated allegation. It would be interesting to see what their response would be to this latest development.

In addition, the cadre of social and political commentators and non-governmental organisations, such as Red Thread and the Guyana Human Rights Association, that are always first out of the blocks at the slightest hint of any scent of an accusation have fallen into stony silence and vague rambling. While some have refused to say anything at all, others have offered muted and guarded responses, exercising a caution in reaching conclusions which they have never previously been known to display.

The most vulgar of all have amongst them, instead of condemning the alleged act and urging swift investigation, timely prosecution, and punishment, have instead sought to distract from the issue by introducing irrelevant diversions on legal and institutional issues and capabilities.

This is not the first time that the accused has been in this situation. And, it is not the first time that these commentators and organisations have failed to take a position on the matter. The real tragedy is that, had organizations  such as Red Thread spoken out on the last occasion and helped to ensure that that act was punished, the current offence might not have been committed.

Their complicity in causing suffering to be inflicted on subsequent victims will be hard to forgive, but the motive for their unabashed duplicity and double standards is easy to identify. Theirs is a moral dispensation informed by political prejudice and guided by political expediency. Were the accused to be remotely perceived as having any affiliation with the incumbent administration, he would have been hung out to dry by the self-appointed moral arbiters, with every thread in sight.

In the current case, the political adventurism of the accused might have saved him from condemnation by that lot for the time being, but he looks unlikely on this occasion to enjoy similar protection by the scales of justice he used to brandish so hypocritically.
DAVE MARTINDALE