I call for the heads of those who must be held accountable

What is this, somebody working overtime to constrict our thinking, to torture grievers? Nineteen murder charges for a distraught juvenile driven to madness by confinement, or the commands of raging flesh, is what the erudite come up with in Guyana to cover their consciences, to distract from the real offenders who should be held accountable for the official failures that locked scores of poor children in an inferno. Thus, a convenient scapegoat is hung out to dry before a mob of howling condoners, the many mindless that makeup the majority of the population in Guyana.

I agree that the child struck the match, as good as pulled the trigger, and the smoke from that weapon is all over. I assert that it points to others beyond that youth now slapped with 19 murder charges. What are we going to go? Detain her at the pleasure of the State for 19 lifetimes? Keep her in protective custody in perpetuity so that society is properly and fully avenged? I dare to ask again, insist (again) that as much as this child must pay some penalty, there are others who should have been dismissed on the spot. Before we hasten to offer this sacrifice, I call for the heads of those who must be held accountable, and must not be given the usual pass, must not be the beneficiaries of looking the other way, must not be in any office for another day, not even for one more hour.

The Minister of Education should have been gone already. It is the only proper consequence of this horror story; not the first on her watch. It would have been the human thing to do. No amount of smiling and hugging, the refuge of the phony and failures, is enough to wash away that is now inerasable from her hands and head. The Minister of Local Government also had to have been given the boot, for the role of his ministry in this conflagration, through the negligence, thoughtlessness, and malfeasances that contributed to this human disaster. The Regional Officers who presided over these deaths are just as responsible and accountable as if they themselves had lit a match.

When hoping for some kind of education to lift out of the quagmire of alcoholism, poverty, sexual abuse, and economic and political exploitation, leads to a tragedy like the one at Mahdia, it illuminates who we are as a people and the civilization that we live in, when only a teenager can be charged for murder. When one is held accountable, only one (so far), then we are not about a government for the people, but of a ghetto of the ghoulish seeking to configure most slyly where the ultimate blame and hammer should fall. If we are going to target a child (and she should be in some way), then that defensive and most bizarre of first steps has to lead higher and snare those I identified earlier and bring them tumbling down.

What kind of woman, what type of man, of rank in government, that places either in proximity to this tragedy, and they are so callous, so brazenly self-serving, that they stand in pretended innocence over the deaths of 19 young, others injured? Instead of hanging around and hoping that scrutiny will bypass them (as usual), and they will evade responsibility (as is the norm), they should be hanging their heads in shame and do the only right thing left for them to do. For try as they may, their names will forever be inseparably and ignominiously linked to Mahdia, to that fire, and to those 19 untimely deaths. For once, let there be some real honesty and decency and integrity where leadership is concerned in this country. Go beyond the teenager. Go after the real perpetrators, the clear contributors, to this calamity that was a disaster waiting to happen, and the resulting tragedy that had to be part of our sordid history.