ATTORNEY GENERAL (AG) and Minister of Legal Affairs, Anil Nandlall said recently, speaking on Political Scope, a programme usually aired on the National Communications Network (NCN), that the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) “will never ever” be comfortable with the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the death of Dr Walter Rodney, regardless of who sits on the commission-even if God were brought down to sit on it.“One would have thought that were they totally confident about their non-involvement and innocence, then this would have been an opportunity for them to be exonerated from any involvement and for their innocence to be vindicated. Unfortunately, the reaction has been different. So they will never be comfortable with it even if we bring God down to earth to sit on the commission,” Nandlall remarked.

He charged that the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), the party founded by Dr Rodney, is now in bed with the PNCR and so they too are uncomfortable with the inquiry. “So you have that kind of incestuous situation there that must bring discomfort to the WPA. So their reaction is also understandable,” Nandlalll stressed.
According to Nandlall, at the time of Rodney’s death, it was widely believed, and until now, that the party in power at that time was responsible for his death or was connected in some way.
An inquest was done at the time but was found to be devoid of any credibility and was manipulated to bring out a particular result which may not have been the truth of what transpired, Nandlall said. “So the death of Rodney remained unanswered for many years,” he said.
Meanwhile, several members of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), under which now comes the PNCR, met a few days ago with the Commissioners to sit on the inquiry but APNU is still unsure of its participation in the public hearings which could commence on April 22.
President Donald Ramotar had agreed, in June 2013, to establish the Commission, following a request from the Rodney family after an inquiry, ordered by former President Desmond Hoyte in 1988, that found Rodney’s death was caused by ‘accident or misadventure’ had been met with grave disbelief.
Dr Rodney died on June 13, 1980 when a remote controlled bomb exploded in his lap while he was sitting in a car with his brother, Donald, at the wheel. He was a strong critic of the PNC Government led by the late President Forbes Burnham.
An ex-Guyana Defence Force (GDF) soldier, the late Sergeant Gregory Smith, had been identified as the army’s electronics expert who had given Dr. Rodney the explosive disguised as a walkie-talkie, and the latter was testing the device on specific instructions from the former. After the incident, Smith had fled to French Guiana, where he remained until he died several years ago.