THIS past Wednesday, a motion with respect to the July 9, 2017 jailbreak and fire was debated in the National Assembly sponsored by MP Edghill, but presented by MP Teixeira due to Edghill’s suspension. It is obvious that the motion itself was designed to score political points but failed to have the desired effect, probably because it was conceptually poor and vacuous in content.

Proponents of the motion struggled to proffer differentiated and cogent arguments as speaker after speaker rose to repeat the same set of arguments almost verbatim, as if ‘dungeoned’ in an echo chamber, often straying from the motion itself. The presentations taken together can fittingly be described as a circus of incoherence, “contradictory and ambivalent.”

During their presentations MPs Hamilton and Manickchand, possibly out of embarrassment, pleaded with Minister Ramjattan, who spoke later, not to refer to the failings of his immediate predecessor, hit seemingly with a bout of the Mr. Nice Guy flu, for the most part, acquiesced. The stewardship of former Minister Rohee and indeed all other ministers who served the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) over the last quarter century need to be placed in context before we talk about the most recent prison tragedies.

Prior to the PPP assuming office in 1992, the average tenure of a minister at the MoHA since 1961 was 18 months, the outlier being Vibert Mingo, who served for 7 years (1973-1980). This situation no doubt would have led to some amount of programmatic instabilities. To their credit, the PPP allowed ministers to settle into their roles, a situation which should have engendered better performance. Feroze Mohamed served for five years, Ronald Gajraj six, Clement Rohee 10 and Gail Teixeira the outlier served just one year.

Rohee is the longest-serving chief of the security sector, he served roughly half of the two decades the PPP had executive control of Guyana. Rohee is therefore most responsible for the shape, state and condition of the security sector inherited by Ramjattan. Rohee served on the heels of one of the worst jailbreaks and corresponding criminal mayhem, but it should not be lost on us that he also inherited a number of robust remedial policy prescriptions, the notable ones being; the British Prison Reform Document (2001), Guyana Prisons Service Strategic Development Plan (2001-2011), Justice Kennard’s CoI Report (2002) and the Disciplined Services Commission Report (2004), coupled with the Lloyd Nickram Security Sector Study (2009) done in the middle of his tenure.

Ramjattan was a mere eight months in office when the 2016 fire and deaths occurred, following which a CoI was convened and report laid by Justice Patterson, this report is essentially a regurgitation of what was contained in Justice Kennard and British Prison Reform reports. What this means is that the same issues that led to the 2002 jailbreak and the ensuing massacre of over 400 citizens were the same issues that precipitated the 2016 tragedy, a strong and telling indication that nothing has changed since 2001.

The malady that inflicted the prison system was symptomatic of pervading poor governance and testament to a general breakdown of law and order, poor administration of justice, plummeting public trust and police performance compounded by a wave of executive lawlessness. The prison system was in full-term pregnancy for a tragedy, the amniotic sac bursting at its seams with corrupt prison officers, overcrowding, aged infrastructure etc. It was impossible for Ramjattan to make any meaningful reforms in just 8 months.

To his credit, by the time of the 2017 escape and fire Ramjattan, had already initiated action on major recommendations of the Patterson CoI Report, he was essentially reaching back to 2006 to take action on matters left unattended by his predecessor. While Manickchand and Hamilton are exasperated by references to their comrade, they must have recognised that both the 2016 and 2017 prison incidents had everything to do with the tenure of Mr. Rohee and the stewardship of the PPP. Rohee’s ejaculation was responsible for this corrupted pregnancy.

Having said that, Ramjattan must be commended for accepting responsibility for the incidents, essentially avowing that it is treacherous to espouse a fully gestated woman only to disavow her offspring, he is in my view providing good nurture for a baby he did not conceive. He announced a raft of prison reforms, law reviews, infrastructural works, consultancies, inter-agency networking, human resource realignment and regular interface with the judiciary to address sentencing guidelines and a framework for alternatives to custodial sentencing.

Though his work programme is fairly acceptable, if Mr. Ramjattan does not remain administratively vigilant he runs the risk of being just as ineffective as his predecessor, I am sure he is aware that the security sector, more than any other, has the potential for rapid decline and is one which citizens express the greatest impatience. It is now his baby and the world is watching to see how he will nurture her.