There is neither honour nor dignity in being Chair of GECOM

Apr 18, 2020 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

As I watch and weigh, I come to this unswerving conclusion: no citizen – no one citizen, in no place at no time under no circumstances – should be put in such a stark and unresolvable situation that redounds to utter discredit, save from those delighted. The current chair of GECOM is in such a set of circumstances at present. I now elaborate and caution that graphic terms may be used for emphasis.
Whatever this GECOM chairwoman, or any other, decides will be damned. She will be demonized and cursed to kingdom come, by some sizable sector of this society. There is no winning, no appealing to the dictates of reason and sober judgment; we are long past and too far gone from any such considerations, such niceties.
There is neither honour nor dignity in being chair of GECOM; come to think of it, no patriotism could be summoned to tender in defence of wanting to, and seeking towards, serving in that accursed post. However she rules, she will be pilloried, given the way GECOM is constructed, given the fevered expectations, given the politically (and racially) fundamentalist madness.
It was why, as warned, there were so many difficulties with agreeing on who was/is fit and proper for filling the position. Oh yeah! Fit and proper pursuant to one outcome and one outcome only. It is that ‘I, and I alone’, will emerge triumphant in whatever process, whatever protocols procedures employed. To emerge victorious – by any methodology, by any innovation, by any concoction – was the one and only finality that mattered, when all the arguing and hedging and supposedly sagacious debates and discourses were over and done.
The proof stares and glares at us from controversies and conflicts galore. And in the dead centre of every fusillade and the furies is the chair. It might as well be the electric chair of the Big House, except that there are no reprieves, including last-minute ones, which are never part of the barbaric and savage Guyanese electoral picture.
It makes for the most harrowing of sights, catapults into a place where the fate of multitudes reside in hands that can either save or destroy. The examples of 75 years ago snatched from the hard, painful history of two men, who found themselves in just such a position, should illustrate where our own GECOM chair is in today’s Guyana.
Robert J. Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb, looked on at Los Alamos on that dawn and was reported to have said: “Now I am become death destroyer of worlds….” He did; and however and wherever retired Justice Claudette Singh, chairwoman of GECOM, decides and leads the way, she would have transformed into a death-like creature and destroyed somebody’s world in Guyana, many such ‘somebodies’.
This is pulverizing to the psyche, but I must proceed to the second example, who was President Harry S. Truman. He had to make a decision, and when he did, he ended up destroying the worlds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost a hundred years later, those environments have still not fully recovered.
This is where the GECOM Chair is right now. Whatever she decides and does will result her becoming the destroyer of some significant segment of Guyanese society. But that fateful decision will have to be made, and then her personal convulsions will begin all over again. I feel for her. No one person should ever be put in such a position that damns wherever turned, whatever is delivered.
I offer this because though sections of Guyana are not done with her yet, the Iron Lady has already been condemned to the scrap-iron yard: seriously tarnished and rusted in many eyes; steel now unrecognisable, and now rendered worn and warped by the worst of local political disfigurements. Every floor has been yanked from under her; now she dangles by a thread; or, depending on the denouncer, in effigy; or, still further, through the equivalent of a full-scale Guyanese political lynching.
It is a tough word, with numerous searing malignancies. But, after I consider all of what has transpired (with more guaranteed to come) , that most injurious and most revealing of words applies through and through. I wish it were otherwise, but we just don’t have it within us to regard anything or anyone with some humanity anymore; it is evidence of the national rabidity that rages.
Through all this, the GECOM Chair has maintained silence mostly, held her peace steadfastly; those alone are enough to confirm assigned guilt, and condemn her to the political gallows by the political rogues, who come out of the woodwork to lay claim to honesty and purity. I see a crowd of criminals baying for blood, unless they get their own truth, and a head on a platter.
Today, I say this: let this daughter of the soil parse and programme and pilot the way forward. There cannot be two winners or joint winners, and to that we had better start conditioning ourselves.
Let her get there first. Thereafter, we can resume the bloodletting and engage to our heart’s content in the blood sport that is Guyanese elections watch, elections wisdom, and elections judgments. Then, when the final bell has rung, we can take it from there. I sense that when that time comes, the guts needed to continue would be severely missing in action.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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