The essence of the problem that we have

Mar 19, 2020 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

If nobody else is ready or willing to call things for what they really are, at bottom, then I will do so again. And then again, until something sensible registers, of the duty owed to one another. I will do so until we stop hedging and stonewalling, or stop denying and evading, or stop fooling ourselves and stop pretending and reaching to the peripherals, when the heart of our existence remains unacknowledged and unaddressed.
What we have is not a GECOM procedural problem. Or a counting problem. Or an intractable domestic problem. Or a looming and ballooning international problem. Or any of the problems associated with democratic norms. I will admit that what we have possesses substantial elements of all those components, but I reject any assertions and positions that those are the extents of our problems. Whether taken individually or in aggregate, they are not the sick heart, the enfeebled soul of our problems.
Editor, the heart of our existence is that we have a racial problem. That is the beginning and end of our circumstances, our way of life. I am immovable in my thinking, my philosophy, my outlook that this racial problem and that it calls for – demands – a racial solution. And that would be a local racial solution. This cannot be addressed through a foreign resolution; it will not hold; it will not help us to overcome our raging demons that doom us to devastation, if not utter national destruction.
Our racial problem must have for a local racial solution, with all leadership hands on deck, all genuine civil society agencies (religious, neutral media, and so forth) on board, and leading to a place other than where we are. This cannot be left or trusted to political figures alone; unfortunately, it cannot include the private sector in any form or fashion.
To digress for a moment, I am 64 years old. I can remember the violence and flames, the passions and the prices. A brother of my mother’s was the driver of the school bus that was blown apart and which killed Godfrey Teixeira; it does not get much closer than that. So, some history is there. I thank God that the memories have not warped me. I was among the less than a handful (literally) of Indians, who went to school in Agricola, where the children and some teachers were arrayed against, but one teacher (black) stood up for me, because she cared about me, I believe she even loved me. The mixed village was also there.
To go further, I have been a beneficiary of the benevolence of senior black Guyanese public servants, which enabled me to earn an honest living before I left here. Those lessons are indelible and have worked to mold me a certain way that sees only country; I cannot see comrades; I can only embrace citizens, including those who detest me for being different.
My belief systems have only reinforced what I am about and must be about unswervingly and unflinchingly. It is why I cannot contribute to any position, any vision, any arrangement by any leader or any group that exacerbates the racial hatreds and antagonisms that now either rage or which threaten to spiral out of control. For at the end of the day, of it all, this is where we are poised most dangerously.
I dive deeply into what is now our obvious, but still denied and dismissed, political dead end: there are no winners anymore. There is neither favourable reception nor some tendril of traction for the other side (that racial side) to take the governance helm and lead forward. If the PPP believes this, it is way less wise than I thought of it. If the PNC (or whatever it is called these days) thinks that it can manage to scrape by and that matters will blow over and fade away locally and internationally, I share this reality check: nothing could be further from the truth, when this most turbulent of milieus is watched and weighed and found terribly wanting.
I return for the umpteenth time to an unchanging position of mine: everyone has to be seated at the table, and all have to be infused with and made to possess a sense of belonging, of sharing, of participating, and of owning. I urge the greatest degree of responsibility and maturity at this most challenging and depressing of times.
I exhort one and all, do not engage in what amounts to a futile and potentially destructive political Mexican standoff. Do not do so while playing at Russian roulette; and doing so, while pointing with live properties and fully loaded chambers. Guyanese contexts and circumstances, at this moment, are set at such a hair trigger’s sensitivity.
May good sense return, overtake, and prevail. Do not let us go down the road mapped. It would be the worst of miscalculations.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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