Guyana: A land is still trapped in the same place

May 27, 2019 Editorial

Independence: liberty and learning to maximise national gifts. And yet, after over a half century, maximisation can be summed up in two words: Never again! This is the unique, always intriguing, nature of what is the soul of Guyanese politics. Nothing changes; save for the intensity of private words and public deeds. No matter how denied, this is what courses through the thinking, visions, and granite-like strategies and tactics of most Guyanese.
Never again, is not the heartfelt pledge or the existential blood oath of the Jewish people after the horrors of the holocaust. It is not monopolised by those victims alone. Instead, “Never again” has been the guiding star and fateful promise that Guyanese political leaders and diehard supporters make to themselves whenever there is electoral triumph. Never again is the readiness to go all out, to prevent the other group, and the other people from power, from sharing. Independence unleashed such passions.
It is why this geographical construction, this patriotic mirage, called Guyana, has nothing that rises to the level of progressive national governance. From the moment of every official election results, the focus and energies are not on how to mend and bring together. No! For in the ecstasies of political and riotous racial revelries, there are already the visions and drive on how to wield power for one’s own, and how to stay in power. Forever. Hence, the unyielding finality of: Never again. Not the other man. Independence hurts.
Of course, the gush of words is sure to come in the heady aftermath of victory. None is soothed; none comforted. None is fooled. Nothing changes. There is that independence, too.
In the heart, this is the unchanging essence of political governance in this nation: How to maintain the foundations, pillars, and architectures of political power in this country. In perpetuity. Specks of alternate racial presences intrude on sight should be enough? In a plural society, this is what passes for the floorboards of all the governance platforms that have ever been erected in this nation. To their eternal discredit and diminishment, political leader and seniors, wordsmiths and propagandists, all say with a straight face and a glaze in one eye that such governance works. The other eye is winking. Independence squandered.
Without a doubt, it works. A critical look reveals that this type of governance of Guyana is what works to remove people from jobs (and replace with acceptable kind in those newly vacant spaces); to stack the contract processes with one perverse practice after another (with appropriate people to make this happen); to set the sails for the future through scholarships (through careful corrective screening); and to establish housing enclaves that would become indebted strongholds (thus supplying fodder for later electoral positionings). Independence has facilitated all this and more.
These are the governance visions, governance practices, and governance realities in this country. They speak powerfully and colourfully for themselves. Inarguably and distinctively so. Collectively, this is the “Never again” mindset and preparation that readies for implementing and reinforcing, when electoral numbers become a done deal; and sets the stage for the raw, ugly, defeatist (and self-defeating in the long-run) governance machinery that is of Guyana, and in Guyana. It is aided incalculably by the now undeniable fact that political Guyana, governance Guyana, is also racial Guyana. A case can be made that it is also a racist Guyana. Independence to remain irreversibly fused to failure.
That this country continues to pretend to exist through the irrelevancy of what now has to be the mockery of a national motto is by itself a daily miracle. Yet this is the governance model that finds favour; except for those on the losing side. Generations after the 1960s and this land is still trapped in the same place. Never again, keeps one set in, and the other set out. Same state. Same present. Same future. Independence: freedom for self-enslavement.

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