FORMER Home Affairs Minister, Ms Gail Teixeira, sees as disquieting and a break with tradition former Commissioner of Police, Mr. Winston Felix’ foray into politics, particularly in light of where his allegiance lies. In a statement issued recently on that and other matters pertaining to public statements Felix has been making of late, Teixeira, who held the Home Affairs portfolio between July 2004 and August 2006, but is now a presidential adviser on governance, said:
“…the fact that Mr. Felix is the first former Commissioner of Police to ever go on a candidates list for any political party… is revealing.”
The only other senior police officer or member of the disciplined services to have done so, she said, was former Assistant Commissioner of Police Sommersal and the late Colonel Godwin McPherson of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF).
The former, who was on the AFC’s list for the 2006 elections, she said, is now on APNU (A Partnership For National Unity) list for the coming polls, while McPherson was “a known executive member of the PNC.”
What is rather interesting, she says, in her 10-page statement, is the fact that Felix was fingered by former US Ambassador to Guyana, Mr. Roland Bullen, as substantiated by official correspondence dated May 28, 2006 and released by the now infamous Wikileaks, “as his most trusted and effective interlocutor on law enforcement issues.”
In retrospect, Teixeira said the period 2001-2008 will forever go down in history “as one of the most complex and anguishing… for the nation, the people and the government,” what with post-election violence, followed by the famed prison outbreak of 2002 and the subsequent invasion of the East Coast community of Buxton by criminal elements and their reign of terror and death being further emboldened by leaders of the Opposition referring to the ensuing mayhem and gore as ‘the  Buxton resistance’ in an already very fragile and volatile political situation.
And to make matters worse, she said, it was about this same timeframe that mother nature chose to visit Guyana with what was to become the worst natural disaster in the country’s recorded history, this being the floods of 2005 which affected well over 300,000 people and destroyed 67% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Noting that Felix, who has been strangely silent for the last five years, has since “crept out of his cloistered quarters” to reveal his ‘cloven hoof’, Teixeira says: “His recent forays into the political arena have been read, I am sure, by many in the Police Force and myself, of course, with some interest…”