Response to Peeping Tom: I’ll take the man on horseback over the men with the horsepower

Jan 27, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Forbes Burnham has been dead for 28 years, but aspects of his rule and life are routinely exhumed by PPP leaders and their cohorts whenever they sense a waning of support among PPP supporters or want to distract from the vexing, senses-numbing corruption in our country. I guess that it won’t be long before a séance becomes necessary to get Mr. Burnham to give his side of the story each time bad deeds are attributed to him.
Peeping Tom wrote the latest exhumation piece on Mr. Burnham (The Man on Horseback, KN, January 21, 2013), anchoring it on a caricatured view of Burnham’s penchant for riding horses and demonizing him with the usual claims about his dictatorial actions and concomitant disdain for Guyanese civil servants.
I am not sure how these exhortatory exhumations are viewed by Guyanese voters, most of whom have spent their lives under PPP rule; but if the election results of November 2011 are a guide, then the Peeper and other PPP propagandists have a difficult task ahead as Indo-Guyanese are finally beginning to realize that the clear and present threat to their well-being is a corrupt and undemocratic PPP, and not any distant deeds that are attributed to Forbes Burnham or the PNC.
But why should Indo-Guyanese be afraid of a dead Forbes Burnham or of the PNC? After all, it is obvious that a dead man can do no harm and, as things currently stand, an Indo-Guyanese has a better chance of competing to run for the presidency of our country as a member of the PNC because most members of the PNC are free to compete to be its presidential candidate, who is elected by a vote of all the party’s members.
The PPP allows no such opportunities because its presidential candidate is selected by a small oracular group that adheres to the politically obsolete but self-serving notion that only a few persons are smart enough to select a presidential candidate. It is this and other realities that the Peeper and other PPP propagandists hope that Indo-Guyanese will never fully awake to, hence their frequent exhuming of the distant deeds of Forbes Burnham.
Barack Obama is the president of the United States, having competed as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. History shows that up until the 1920s, the Democratic Party did not gladly welcome African-Americans, so they voted for the Republicans. Today we have an African-American who became US president, running as a candidate for a party that once loathed African-Americans.
Indo-Guyanese can follow this example and try to fully reform the PNC simply by joining it in large numbers and competing for various positions, including being the party’s presidential candidate.
That may have been anathema a few years ago, but duty to our nation demands it now. And whenever the PPP chooses to democratize by allowing its presidential candidate to be elected by all of its members, Afro-Guyanese can in large numbers join the PPP and attempt to fully reform it. So in my view, our country’s eventual liberation depends on the internal democratization of all of our political parties.
Once this internal democratization occurs and Indo- and Afro-Guyanese choose to join the PPP and the PNC in large numbers, policy will eventually replace race as the major factor in which party gets our vote. And our nation would be spared propaganda of the type engaged in by the Peeper.
Propaganda pieces like the Peeper’s, however, allow an informed or thinking person to compare and contrast the alleged deeds of Forbes Burnham and his PNC with the known deeds of the PPP and its governments. Forbes Burnham, the Peeper’s man on horseback, lived in a Belfield, East Coast Demerara home right next to working class people and rode horses, just as many Guyanese have been doing for as long as horses have been in our country.
And I’m quite sure that many Guyanese were gratified that a slow-moving horse allowed them a better view of their leader. I’m also sure that those horses at full throttle did not constitute any threat to the safety of our citizens or to the integrity of their homes.
Many other working class Guyanese also counted most PNC/ PNC government officials and ministers as neighbours, and owned bigger and better looking cars and homes than those officials/ministers.
However, PPP/ PPP government officials and their cohorts drive vehicles that are way too costly for the salary they earn and with horsepower way too much for our roadways. In fact, many of our citizens may be killed and/or their homes rattled or collapsed if PPP/PPP government officials ever place their high horsepower vehicles at full throttle.
Many of those same officials, including Bharrat Jagdeo, also live in secluded communities, away from the working class, in palatial mansions that are the unreachable dreams of high-level government officials, ambassadors, and ministers from/in developed countries such as the United States, France, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Norway, and others that pour grants/loans into our country.
By the time the undemocratic PPP and the corruption under it are done with Guyana, our people will come to realize that the Peeper’s caricatured man on horseback could not have been as bad as the PPP officials and their cohorts who live in palatial mansions and drive vehicles with enough horsepower to wake Forbes Burnham and his horses from the dead.
So when all is said and done, for the sake of our nation’s treasury and as my contribution to the fight against corruption and unjust enrichment, I’ll always recommend any man who prefers to be on horseback over the men currently displaying their mansions and horsepower.
Lionel Lowe

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