It’s about the primacy of power

Jan 13, 2019 Editorial

Political leaders and political parties have tried different things over the years. They keep trying different combinations and concoctions; all to no avail because of limited utility, less acceptability, and still less longevity. There has to be a reengineering of thinking and related visions.
The same political leaders and parties have analyzed, evaluated, and calculated. Endlessly. Cleverly. They come up short, with the final governance product unsatisfactory, temporary, and laden with controversy. There is insistence on using the side door, the back door, and any other door imagined and with which they declare themselves pleased and proud. None have worked. All have suffered, with the most recent toppling on December 21, last.
Why not the obvious? What about the front door? Wide. Accommodating. Clear-eyed, clear-cut, and clearly promising. At least, it offers the most promise. Look closely and critically, and it is inarguable that all prior approaches and strategies embody crude political gimmickry, exercises in denial, and exercises in repeated futility.
And as the latest exercise on that red letter evening reminded so recently, these things aggregate negativity.
Take a look: PNC-UF; PPP/Civic; and APNU-AFC. It has been warped partnerships of convenience; fitful alliances of expediency. Such political arrangements have faltered at the altar of enduring relationships; as in shotgun marriages involving the yoking of two hapless citizens.
If such forced-feeding does not work and last in the real world of just two, it beggars the imagination and intellect, and capsizes commonsense and native wisdom that they will endure in an aroused nation; a hostile, troubled, and distrustful one.
This is more tragic to behold and comprehend when the obvious, the more practical, the poignantly untried waits and withers.
The more hardcore will scoff. The extremist and triumphalist will resist. They scoff and resist because they are fearful of relinquishing their periodic monopoly on power. This justifies personal existence and place, and which renders those leading any charge ill-equipped, ill-prepared, and ill at ease with any other approach including the sensible, the realistic, and the promising.
It has never been about the priority of the peoples; only the primacy of the power trust. Everything else have been attempted. All were doomed from the start. Why not this? Why not shared governance? Why not some strain (still undefined, still to be decided) of a panoramic national front governance apparatus that leads to somewhere else?
Indeed, they have a history in other environments of lacking traction for continuity. The local one would start with some considerable substance; it provides space to work and craft: constitution, governance structures, political responsibility, inclusivity, oversight mechanisms through robust checks and balances, and the type of citizen empowered to serve.
There is much thinking and regrouping ahead, but these must be of a holistic kind: the playing field has to be level, the corpus of the oil wealth respected and preserved; the rights of all Guyanese enshrined and honored.
Because the oil score is right now, there has to be unprecedented sensitivity and cerebral expenditure to exploiting fully and constructively this national treasure. Strengths and threats must be recognized and distinguished; opportunities seized and amplified.
All of this, and so much more left unmentioned, cannot be executed (must not be) by any single political group, one racial segment, one social stratum. No matter how well-conceived, how well-intentioned, the deep pervasive distrusts that infest and energize this land will find such endeavors lacking, treacherous, and sinister.
The ancient local political curse has caused this society to lose its soul; it is hoped that the current oil blessing does not result in the loss of its head.

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