The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

EDITORIAL

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

On the Office of the Prime Minister’s statement, Kwame McCoy’s condemnation of Hadiyyah Mohamed, and the video that says otherwise

There is a particular species of political statement that survives only in the dark — issued in the confident hope that no one troubled themselves to record what actually happened. The Office of the Prime Minister’s Monday release on the confrontation between Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Hadiyyah Mohamed does not have that luxury. Guyana has the video. It has had it since the moment the exchange occurred inside the precincts of Parliament, in full public view, during a sitting convened in the shadow of the MV Barima tragedy. 

The Office’s statement asks the country to disbelieve its own eyes.

Let us be exact about what is being alleged and by whom. The Prime Minister’s office says Ms. Mohamed “forced herself into the precincts of Parliament” and directed “offensive and distasteful remarks” at the Prime Minister. It says the precincts “must not be reduced to a stage for intimidation, disorder and Opposition theatrics.” It commends Mr. Phillips for a “composure” it says reflected “discipline, dignity and restraint.” Each of these claims is checkable against a public record that shows something close to the reverse.

WHAT THE PUBLIC BUILDING ACTUALLY CONTAINS

Hadiyyah Mohamed did not force her way anywhere. Family members of MV Barima victims — a tragedy that has already claimed lives the government has yet to fully account for — came to Parliament to see the Leader of the Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, whose party had spent the sitting wearing placards bearing photographs of the dead. It was the Prime Minister who inserted himself into that meeting, approaching grieving relatives to offer condolences the Opposition contends were overdue and unearned given the ministerial record on the disaster. When Ms. Mohamed pressed him on when the government intended to correct what she and others regard as its failures, it was Mr. Phillips who told her to “get from here” and demanded to know why she was in the building — a public building, funded by the public, that she has every right to enter. It was his personal security detail that made physical contact with her. And it was Mr. Phillips himself who called it off: “leave her, don’t touch her.”

Throughout, by every account and every frame of footage that has circulated, Ms. Mohamed remained composed. She addressed the Prime Minister of Guyana as “sir.”

That is not the vocabulary of a street thug. It is the vocabulary of a citizen who understood, even as she was being physically handled by state security inside a legislative building, that she was the one behaving correctly.

THE OFFICE’S STATEMENT INVERTS THE RECORD

Which makes the Prime Minister’s office’s chosen framing worth sitting with. Parliament, the statement says, “is not a political street corner.” Correct. And on the available video, it was not Ms. Mohamed who turned it into one. A Prime Minister who tells a grieving citizen to “get from here” while his security lays hands on her has not modeled discipline; he has demonstrated exactly the disorder his own office now attributes, backwards, to the person on the receiving end of it.

Composure is not what a camera recorded. What a camera recorded was a public official losing control of an encounter he initiated, and a young woman keeping hers.

The statement goes further, invoking Ms. Mohamed’s

That is not an accountability argument. It is guilt assigned by bloodline, dressed up in the language of institutional standards. The 592 Guardian has covered Azruddin Mohamed’s legal jeopardy on its merits and will continue to; it is a different matter entirely, and beneath the dignity the Office claims to be defending, to use a brother’s indictment as a cudgel against his sister’s conduct in an encounter the video shows she did not instigate.

A FAMILIAR VOICE, A FAMILIAR PATTERN

This is not the first time the Mohamed’s  has been cast as the aggressor by officials whose own conduct invited scrutiny. Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister Kwame McCoy has built something of a specialty out of it, previously accusing her of running a “deliberate misinformation campaign” during last year’s election recount — an accusation issued, as this one was, in a statement rather than in any forum where the claims could be tested against contrary evidence. The pattern is consistent: an official statement asserts a narrative; the available video contradicts it; no correction follows. Guyanese are entitled to notice the pattern, and to weigh a government’s fondness for it against its professed devotion to institutional standards.

None of this excuses genuine disorder in the National Assembly, wherever it originates, or license for any citizen — related to an indicted figure or not — to disrupt the proceedings of Parliament.

That is a real standard, and this publication  holds all sides to it. But the Office of the Prime Minister’s own statement is not a defense of that standard. It is an attempt to relocate blame from the official whose security touched a citizen to the citizen who was touched, and to do so using her brother’s legal troubles as aggravating evidence against her.

The nation has the footage. It does not need a taxpayer-funded press release to tell it what it watched.

WHAT ACTUALLY WARRANTS REJECTION

The Prime Minister’s office is right about one thing: Guyana must firmly reject this level of political hostility and disrespect. It should start by rejecting it from whichever side of an encounter it actually originated — and on the record so far available to the public, that is not the side the statement names. If the Office of the Prime Minister believes otherwise, the remedy is simple and available to it: release the full, unedited footage in its possession, alongside a transcript, and let the public standard the statement invokes be applied evenly.

Short of that, this cannot and must not become the new normal either — a government official manhandling a grieving citizen in a public building, and then authoring the official record that says she did it to him. —The Board