I DOUBT whether there is a more comical moment in Caribbean state leadership to rival the exclamation of Keith Rowley, when, in his final address to his party on demitting office as Prime Minister, he went into an emotional paroxysm about the urgency of Trinidad leaving the Privy Council.

Rowley’s antics were clownish. In fact, he was the clown on stage. Here was a man who was Prime Minister of his country, not for nine months but nine years and rejected the transition of the Privy Council to the Caribbean Court of Justice. Please see my column of Wednesday, March 19, 2025, “Keith Rowley: Black skin, white mask.”

Jamaica is the home of the music of Bob Marley, the Rastafari religion, and the genius of Usain Bolt. But you cannot get the descendants of the Mulatto/Creole Class (MCC) in Jamaica to dump the Privy Council. It is a deep-seated inferiority complex of the MCC in the Caribbean that sees Western culture as its standard bearer. Once the ruling classes and their parties are from the MCC, Jamaica will not remove the Privy Council and will never pursue deeper CARICOM integration.

So, the opposition parties and the Guyana Human Rights Association, the Stabroek News and the MCC wanted a foreign forensic team to investigate the double murders of the Henry Cousins in Cotton Tree in September 2020. Nigel Hughes openly advocates for the rejection of the Regional Security Team (RSS) to conduct the investigation of recent police killings in Linden. He wants people from outside the region.

The mother of the 11-year-old girl whose death is being investigated has rejected the pathologist from Barbados. The family wants the FBI to send a pathologist. Is the mother being advised by MCC and opposition elements about the inferiority and inabilities of Caribbean pathologists? The Barbados pathologist is a highly respected Caribbean professional who worked for the UK government for more than a decade. But we don’t want him because, as in the case of Nigel Hughes and the Linden investigation, there is a question of trust.

So, let’s operationalise how the conspiracy will work with the Caribbean specialists and the Government of Guyana. The RSS investigators and the Barbados pathologist are expected to compromise their work. And using my imagination, it is supposed to go like this: the RSS team and the Barbados pathologist are approached by top power-wielders in government and simply ask the people to compromise their integrity, and they will do it because the Guyana Government asked them to do so.

This is the extent to which Caribbean professionals and scientists are disrespected by their own society. So, the Caribbean specialists will alter their findings to please the Guyana Government, but not the pathologist from the FBI. The FBI’s pathologist will not compromise himself for one reason only. And that reason lies in the psyche of the Caribbean citizen who has an inferiority complex. The complex works in the simplest way for any school kid to understand. The FBI man is not from the Caribbean, so he has to be a superior person that the Guyana Government cannot influence.

A few words about the FBI. The man who currently heads it is named Kashyap Pramod Patel, a dark-skin, East Indian who is a practising Hindu. Mr. Patel wrote a devastating book critical of the nature and work of the FBI. In his book, Mr. Patel made the most shocking accusations against the FBI, which include using its office for political purposes, including targeting American establishment politicians for their political advocacy.

President Trump appointed Patel because Mr. Trump claimed that the FBI was used as a weapon against him. The same FBI investigated Mr. Trump based on a dossier which accused the Russians of having compromising material on Trump, thus he may be blackmailed by the Russians. The dossier initiated during the Obama presidency and continued by Biden turned out to be a booklet whose fiction was not only poor but boring.

Let’s entertain a thought in the opposite direction before we end. Since the MCC and some sections of Guyanese society think that Caribbean specialists cannot be trusted and their integrity is open to question, what about the foreign companies in Guyana who have local law firms advising them? What if these foreign investors accept the theory of Caribbean inferiority complex? Should they rely on such local firms to litigate in court for them? Can the foreign companies trust Caribbean professionals who see themselves as inferior to Western people? Why a pathologist from the FBI and not Brazil, not India, not China? The answer is simple. Read Franz Fanon or listen to Bob Marley.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.