The road to elections

Dec 29, 2019 Editorial

It seems like it took forever to get to this point. From December 21, 2018 to now feels like a lifetime. It has been a hard road, with all the passions and politics that we seem to drum up effortlessly.
Now that parliament is about to be dissolved, what is ahead for us? What is in store for this nation, where polls bring out the worst in us?
It is doubtful, whether we could succeed in managing ourselves with maturity, with the temperate. Because now that bell has rung, it is off to the hustings, to appeal to the voters, to position and reposition in one mad rush.
March 2, 2020 is not far away. There is so much to do and, yet, for the most part, the Guyanese voter has already made up his or her mind. One would have thought that for all the talk of change, that the new groups may have had some semblance of a chance to make inroads, with few votes here, a seat there.
Except that it isn’t, since very few experiment into the unknown by taking a chance on the issues, the promise, and the possibilities. Some of the new people ought to have been given the opportunity to flourish electorally.
Regrettably, that is a non-starter, and the signs and portents indicate that it is a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, and when all the analyses are studied, things point to the usual.
The usual that is history and tradition, and now an integral aspect of settled political and electoral culture. Because the thinking and outlook boil down to this hard pass, this enduring reality: why take a chance and go some other way?
It is because one vote less for the favoured is one vote for the other group. And that is unthinkable, is troublesome and is fraught with many different kinds of problems; problems with managing the oil, problems with governance, problems with being left out in the wilderness and losing out on this bonanza that is intriguing as to the potentials.
As we go into early 2020, there are fears that this is going to be the mother and grandmother of elections. How will we be? Can we dig deep and find it in ourselves to discover the unprecedented and the extraordinary?
This publication is not optimistic, as the days ahead will bear out and confirm, how we really are at the core. For here it is, that we stand on the doorstep of a prosperous horizon, and all we can do is bicker and quarrel, and gouge at each other.
Greed rules the roost, when everyone knows that there is another way, a better approach instead of fooling ourselves with that which has failed and failed. As matters heat up (and they will), it is hoped that wisdom and civility would be the order of the day.
Can we do so, be so, when so much is at stake? The odds are not favourable, because we have always lost it, when so much less was in the offing.
This paper calls upon all those sentinels, such as the Guyana National Broadcast Authority and the Ethnic Relations Commission, among others, to manifest the highest degree of watchfulness, the greatest of cautions, so that we can conduct ourselves with dignity and decency.
Surely, this can’t be asking too much of us. Because, come to think of it, what are the alternatives, other than the unwise and the ugly?
All leaders must be responsible, and must set the example for their supporters. They must demand a strict adherence to what is positive and wholesome. This is nonnegotiable, it is not up for discussion, for all it takes is one folly to take us down a terrible pathway.
The world is at our feet; we can kick it, or we can conquer it.

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