PRESIDENT David Granger has dismissed calls by the former Home Affairs Minister, Clement Rohee to fire Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan over the fiery Camp Street prison riot which killed 17 inmates.The President described Rohee’s call as “absurd” noting that he [Rohee] is the least qualified person to speak on the issue.
Rohee, at a PPP press conference on Monday blamed the prison riot on President Granger and Minister Ramjattan. “Lying at the feet of Ramjattan, and indeed the Granger administration, are seventeen — not three — dead bodies…Heads must roll for this unforgiveable and unforgettable episode,” Rohee said.
In response, President Granger made it known that he has no intentions of dismissing his Public Security Minister. “It is quite absurd because Minister Ramjattan is trying to clean up the mess we inherited nine months ago and the former Minister was the Minister of Home Affairs for nine years and he never did the things he is talking about now, so I don’t know how he can expect us in nine months to clean up the mess he encouraged for nine years,” President Granger said.
Rohee had also called on the APNU+AFC government to implement several recommendations of the Strategic Plan for the Guyana Prison Service but according to President Granger, Rohee failed to implement those very recommendations when he was in office.
“Many of these recommendations he failed to implement; some of them are structural, some of them involve training and we are working assiduously to put those changes in place to make sure that we have a proper system in the Guyana Prison Service. All the problems we discovered have existed for a couple of decades. There was a huge riot at Mazaruni Prison, where several buildings were burned down, the escapees in the Mashramani jail break; all these things happened under the previous administration. We’re now trying to put structural reforms in place to prevent any recurrence,” the President told reporters.
Meanwhile, Ramjattan had also brushed off Rohee’s assertions, pointing out that the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces still has confidence in his abilities. “If he wants, he can go to the Parliament and move a no-confidence motion against me, like what the Opposition did to him while he was Minister; because I am quite sure that if he was minister, last week the situation would have been worse,” Ramjattan had told this newspaper.
The Minister said that based on how things unfolded after the unfortunate incident at the prison, he is confident that the government had managed the situation to the best of its ability, and had transformed the issue, which would have further deteriorated if Rohee were still Home Affairs Minister.
The remand section of the Georgetown Prison saw, last week, three days of rioting, which left 17 inmates dead and several others injured following a fire which they set at the penitentiary after prison officers had raided their cells and had found 19 cell phones and a quantity of marijuana. Several prison officers and joint services ranks were also injured during confrontations with the prisoners, who were protesting for better conditions in the prison system.