Latest update December 17th, 2024 3:32 AM
The Guyana Constitution – Scrap it and start all over again
The constitution blankets Guyana in a suffocating vice. It can’t breathe or move, actually live. Isn’t it time to amputate and cremate this poisoned limb that rots Guyana’s body?
The Guyana constitution is the longest-running, biggest fraud perpetrated here. It is kept relevant by self-serving politicians. Then there are those citizens – mighty and lowly, learned yet ignorant – who wipe away ashes from their faces to refer to it, stand for it, pretend at living with it. It is a pitiful living.
The Guyana constitution has one purpose: convenience; the convenience of a cloak of thorns that succeeds only in laying bare more disgracefully the utter nakedness of this society, and its hypocritical sons and daughters, who hold it shamelessly aloft as meaning something: presented as something to lift out of the grave, even when it buries deeper.
As a document, the Guyana constitution is a handbook for the unethical. Thus, it has been used by those empowered by the ballot, those advantaged by circumstances, and those who breathe and smell of the unpatriotic.
There are these self-congratulating, believed masterly interpretations of what it means, should mean, and must mean. In fact, the Guyana constitution has been found to have so many meanings that, in effect, it has no meaning at all. This is so, regardless of “the names, battle slogans and costumes” (Marx) of its endless interpretations. This constitution is crutch to lean on, football to kick around, and pillow to dream on to varying degrees of satisfaction. It has been flashed to exhibit heavyweight intellect, differentiating substance, and native wisdom; the lowest common denominator results.
And yet this self-destructive apparition, this enfeebling concoction, this entombing abomination is worshipped by men who rush to identify themselves as the most thoughtful in the midst: citizens proclaiming impulses towards the profound, the visionary, and possibly the forward march of a nation.
Against all of this, and when examined honourably, it becomes undeniable that the Guyana constitution aids cunning and self-serving elites in this nation in the same manner, and to an identical degree, that the formal existence of a home functions for betrayers of the domestic hearth. Like the imagined castle of a make-believe home, the constitution is there: a sanctuary in which to seek refuge as the spasmodic urges pulse to remind that there is just such a provision when the times are not so favourable.
Today, the door of this relied-upon current constitution must be slammed shut. Forever! This rotten-to-the-core edifice blown up. This is what the truly committed in this country would do; those tired of all the running around, the draining life experiences. Blow up the constitution. Let the pieces scatter to the four winds. Bring the final curtain down on what has filled with so much emptiness, so much weakness, while leaving so completely helpless.
Start over Guyana! Start with nothing. But start with simplicity, honesty, and the purity of a particular brand of ingenuity that, for once, gifts this crippled nation something special, something sacred, that it can clasp to its collective breast.
A clean start can only be thought of, tried, and delivered if there is the simple decency, the nationwide humility that for too long we have erred, through listening to selfish visions leading to troubled destinies. Calls have been for the two leaders to meet and reach for compromise. They must do so without reference to the constitution. Article this and clause that will only imprison longer in solitary.
Men must assemble with clear heads and a clean page: no preconditions. That’s a constitution of commonsense that could help to creep towards political consensus. Only then can Guyanese – leaders and populace – give energy, inspiration, and life to what could usher in the thinnest ray of light for a future tomorrow. In the disasters of ongoing crises, this country has the opportunity to cease being dishonest with itself, and just this once embark on what could be life-giving.
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