Top…

…COP
Your Eyewitness is intrigued by President Granger’s proclivity for coming up with new “criteria” when selecting top officials for the various Government and State institutions.
When choosing the Chair of GECOM, he insisted for the longest while that if the person wasn’t a judge, he or she must have “judge-like” qualities. Your Eyewitness thought the President was insisting that the person be “sober” – from the oft-quoted phrase “sober as a judge” – even though he knew of quite a few members of the Bench who “had a thing” for “high spirits” of both the “hijinks” and “spiritous” varieties!!
Anyhow the President explained he was looking for a person with “qualities of impartiality, integrity and intelligence” – which he seemed to feel judges inherently possessed. But he just as obviously thought folks had forgotten that it was precisely those qualities the Judges who’d been the GECOM Chairs during the Burnham era were lacking!! “Toothless poodles”, the normally circumspect Jagan had described one of them!!
So no one was surprised when the fella Granger picked – Justice Patterson — showed he was severely challenged in the very same qualities. He clearly had a severe deficiency in impartiality, since he was flagrantly supportive of the PNC in his Facebook page. As for “integrity”, he blew that requirement when he admitted he’d inflated his qualifications by claiming he’d been “Chief Justice” of Grenada. Said it was “a slip of the pen”!! Your Eyewitness figured he wasn’t that “intelligent” if he thought he could get away with such a checkable whopper!!
Anyhow, the President was back at it with his “criteria” schtick on his appointment of the new Commissioner of Police. The COP had to be “unbribable”, and he would submit his shortlist to a “test”! So far, so good. Tests are good, no? But even before the test was applied, there was the matter of how he came up with his “shortlist”, when he excluded the man acting in the position and the one with the most seniority in the top ranks – David Ramnarine. Pressed on this issue, he claimed he had “specific” reasons – but which he wouldn’t divulge!!
This being Guyana, the chatterati, of course, immediately flew into a frenzy of speculation – was he caught with his hand in the till? Was Ramjattan’s recommendation the kiss of death? Was he in cahoots with “drug lords”? (This wasn’t a defect, and was possibly even a plus; since one former top COP with such a relationship was given “Minister wuk” by Granger!!)
But what your Eyewitness knows for sure is that Ramnarine’s name is now “mud,” since folks will automatically wonder about the skeleton in his closet, which Granger couldn’t even mention.
The horror!! The horror!!
…test??
But then there was the test itself – which turned out to be a portion of the Social Studies section of the 6th Grade Test. Surely, the President jests!! Is this what he thinks the “intelligence” of the Top Cop ought to be measured by? But hold it! Maybe it wasn’t really a “test”. Just as how, sometime back, our mavens in the education sector figured that kids finishing primary school shouldn’t be “tested” but “assessed”, could it be Granger felt his top COP candidates ought to be “assessed”?
After all, the “assessment model” was just supposed to identify areas of weakness in the candidates’ pertinent knowledge base that could be rectified in the new office. Your Eyewitness assumed the key word was “pertinent,” and therefore wondered how pertinent is the geography of Guyana to the better running of the GPF.
And in the years after the GPF was formed in 1839, haven’t there been refinement in Police testing??
And how would Basil Williams, one of the three who administered the assessment, fare??
…spot
Asked as to whether he’ll run as APNU’s candidate in 2020, President Granger was, as usual, quite coy. Said he wouldn’t “refuse to serve” if asked to.
So who’ll be brazen enough not to ask him??!!