Just two weeks after he was gunned down and even as the Guyana Police Force is still to find his killers, political activist Courtney Crum-Ewing has been described as nothing more than a “nuisance value” by President Donald Ramotar.
Speaking at a Berbice meeting over the weekend, President Ramotar distanced his administration from the activist’s murder and declared that the man was no threat to the governing party or the government.
Mr. Ramotar told the meeting that “I don’t know the motive, but they claim that he was assassinated, that it was political assassination. But if we take their assumption to be true, then who has to gain by his death? He was no threat to the PPP and he was no threat to the government. He was no threat. He was a nuisance value more than anything else”.
Ramotar said if Crum-Ewing’s death was political then he must have been a “pawn who was scarified”. He claimed that the late activist used him Facebook page to spread messages of hate and to make racist remarks. The government never made any such accusation while the activist was alive.
Crum-Ewing had protested for weeks outside the Chambers of the Attorney General calling on the Attorney General to resign from office over the contents of a recorded telephone conversation with a Kaieteur News reporter. 
The Attorney General never left office and after an election date was announced, Crum-Ewing launched a one man get out the vote campaign in support of the APNU-AFC coalition. He was using a loud hailer to encourage residents of Diamond to vote the PPP out of office, when he was shot five times to the body. Three of those shots were close range shots to his head.
The political activist had filed two complaints with the police accusing two members of the government of threatening his life. Those complaints were reportedly not taken seriously by the police.
It is unclear whether any investigations were ever launched into his claims. Just after the murder, President Ramotar called on the police to carry out a full and thorough investigation into the incident .
But with that investigation stalled and the opposition political parties laying blame for the man’s murder at the doorsteps of the PPP administration, the President is speaking up more about Crum-Ewing.
During the Berbice meeting the President also compared Crum-Ewing’s flag draped casket to that of notorious criminal Linden Blackie London who was gunned down while turning himself over to police back in the year 2000.
Mr. Ramotar told the Berbice meeting that the opposition parties have always “taken the side of the criminals, they put the Guyana flag on Blackie’s coffin and then they put the flag on this man Crum-Ewing too”.
Courtney Crum-Ewing was not known to have been involved in any criminal activity. He remigrated to Guyana from Antigua in 2013 and started his own mini bus operations. He was a former officer of the Guyana Defence Force who had been dismissed but later won a court action against the GDF.
During his many protests, Crum-Ewing complained about the state of Guyana under the PPP and loudly voiced his opinion that the country needed change.
Retired Chief of Staff of the Guyana Defence Force, Major General Joe Singh in a letter to the newspaper called for a full probe of the former officer’s murder and said the only law Crum-Ewing may have broken, was his use of a loud hailer as he sought justice.
Filed: 25th March, 2015
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