FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NOVEMBER 15, 2024
AFC Press Release on Guyana Police Force
The AFC notes that the PPP Government is on a path towards the covering up of massive corruption in the Guyana Police Force (GPF). Predictably, its leaders are selling the falsity that the Police Force is substantially professional, and largely that everything is honky-dory, and the Opposition is only mischievously exaggerating.
The AFC on the other hand wishes to point out that there is method to this madness of the PPP’s approach which it allows as ongoing in the GPF. The continuation of low salaries for our policemen in a time of major revenues from oil has a political logic about it and bears a relationship to the PPP’s corruption.
The GPF is crucial to the PPP regime’s survival. The GPF’s officers are charged with maintaining civil order. Civil order to be kept necessarily means preventing anti-government protest and oftentimes persecuting activists of the Opposition with the intent to drive so much fear that criticism and dissent are neutralized. A Police Force will do these acts either through great commitment to the Government, or because it gets good compensation.
The communist/leninist tradition of the PPP Government informs it, however, that though proper compensation can be provided directly out of the Treasury at this time, through the legitimate form for increased salaries, the PPP permits the easiest way to compensate the police for their loyalty is to give certain favoured officers and rank and file free reign to be corrupt.
Pay them so little that they can’t help but realize it is not only acceptable but necessary for them to be corrupt. Then they will be doubly beholden to the regime: first, they will be grateful for the wealth the regime lets them accumulate; second, they will understand that if they waiver in loyalty, they are at risk of losing their privileges and being prosecuted. That explains what is happening in the recently exposed Brutus debacle, which has made Brutus the richest policeman in Guyana.
A number of officers who remain with integrity are shunned, fired and persecuted like the officers at the credit union who were transferred by the Commissioner immediately upon the exposure of this debacle.
This method provides the means to ensure regime loyalty without having to pay good salaries, and it guarantees the means to ferret out every beneficiary who fail to remain loyal. What could be better from a PPP’s perspective?
The AFC demands that pressure be put on the PPP administration by Guyanese and the diplomatic community to have a reputable, international, independent body to investigate the Guyana Police Force.
END
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