Latest update April 4th, 2025 6:13 AM
Why no elections date?
There are much-anticipated meetings of leaders followed by the now normal falloff and letdown. There is an established pattern: the actualities of pre-meeting speeches, then meetings, and last more 
speeches for the benefit of media and target audience.
A peak of high interest and the inevitable descent into a low valley of the dispiriting; there are lots of language, and in the wake of those come the flotsam of the baggage that this nation is unable to carry.
At this point, all Guyanese, other than the acutely incapacitated, are aware that this is over a date, an elections date. Nothing forthcoming, nothing doing.
For starters, the constitution has to be thrown out the door. After being subjected to one desecration after another, by the same battling political adversaries, that sanctuary and authority is out of bounds. Any pretense or insistence upon relevance and applicability and binding force would be the height of political and leadership hypocrisy.
Nevertheless, worst things have been tried and have succeeded in this disturbed entity named Guyana. Sure, a constitution is always there as a convenient smokescreen; except that this time, no citizen and no segment, other than the increasingly busy judiciary, possesses the interest or the patience to muster anything beyond lip service to what should have been sacred.
Hearts are not into that façade; and so are most heads. It leaves in a terribly bad place.
Since there is no guiding–indeed, compelling-force, or no high principle at work– then the door is open for a Pandora’s Box of perversities to take over what passes for discourse and deliberations at the leadership levels.
Now it is wide open territory for the whimsical, the arbitrary, and the capricious to seize the day and upper ground. All of these elements have first infiltrated and next, quickly saturated the exchanges about an elections date.
From all appearances and the sharply acidic reports, there is entrenched unilateralism, but coming from two directions at the same time. Thus, a divided citizenry looks on (depending on the section of the perimeter inhabited) helplessly, worriedly, angrily, disbelievingly, or gleefully at the collision of irresistible force and immovable object.
This is not about theoretical physics; rather, it is the relentless bludgeon of domestic politics and in the same unsparing force field of collision.
It does not matter that the partisan, excited or their grim opposite, either have no sense of the fire being played with; or lack a panoramic vision that allows for an appreciation (or healthy fear) of the endgame. Great collateral damage usually ensues.
What matters is that a date continues to elude because men approach the table of engagement with irrefutable first dates. They are far apart in the preconceived and precalculated dates that work for one side or the other only; they comfort only those offering them.
If there are any fallback second options as to a timely and mutually satisfactory date, they are still to be heard publicly. The emphasis has to be on mutual.
For what had to have occurred is that any counteroffers made by either group represented merely inching along from the earlier false starts; the gap is so wide as to be unbridgeable. For one thing, the close-door conversations are too short; leaders have to demonstrate to a watching and intrigued nation that they are serious about this crucial business of the people, and which involves the welfare of those same people.
They have to stay behind those doors and hammer out compromise dates until there is glimmer of progress, if not finality.
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