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To where?
The recount is over. It is time for GECOM to declare the results and make official the now nationally and internationally known winner of this most grinding of Guyanese elections. This must be done with the minimum of delay, the utmost urgency. But as we call for this, we get the strong sense, and are faced with the overpowering reality that it just may not be so. For from some not-so-strange intuition, there is the premonition that the going will not be smooth or positive from here.
Where is this country going? All things considered, especially the existing endless embroiling and embittering current circumstances, are we going anywhere? In view of its precarious edge on which we are perched, now that the stormy recount is over, can we as a society, we as its collective peoples, go anywhere? Do we have what is required to take this overheated, over -strung home of ours to another place, anywhere else, other than in the lost mazes and hazes that lead all of us further downhill?
The Chair of GECOM has an obligation to act now, will she? The incumbent caretaker president has a responsibility to act now and honour his previously given word and commitment made before all about his readiness to accept “whatever” declaration is made by GECOM, will he?
In answer to all those questions, we at this publication are pained to state that we do not think that it will be so, as graced by the deeds from the two pivotal leaders identified. Similarly, we do not envision, and no less sadly, that we, as a society of many peoples, have what it takes, to rise and deliver what these most immediate and menacing of times demand. We are not going anywhere. Our systems and structures do not allow it or encourage any such outward or upward vision, along with any of the corresponding interest and efforts to carry us somewhere else, besides where we are hopelessly bogged down. And neither, too, do our narrow outlooks and heated passions permit the principled occurring. Elections 2020 will not be over, until it is finally, totally, really over. Recount finished credibly or not, international observers positions or not, factual situation or not. We are not going anywhere.
These are the promised realities of our stormy arena. The courts will move, like emergency room surgeons, to stanch recognized bleeding issues on an expedited basis. For however the courts rule, in what promises to be an ongoing procession of narrow petitioning, the tensions intensify in what is now the crunch time of the endgame. On the outside in wider Guyana, underlying malaise and malevolence drag everyone down. There is neither respite nor retreat, absolutely no give from any political or racial quarter, in any degree. Thus, we remain inextricably lodged where we are like a beached deoxygenated beast, and with the weight of our accumulated burdens driving us deeper into the quick-sand that is our political and social real estate.
Separately, the international community may be forced to do more than counsel and mediate. It may have to unleash its long threatened nuclear option: sanctions. The pitches are to teach the coalition a lesson, the one that is deserving and overdue, according to its political and civic opponents. That may be so, but whatever is applied does not corner the coalition alone, it has the potential to cripple this society and bring it to its knees. And the longer that there is determined holding out, the more piercing and intolerable the pain across the expanse of citizens.
Against this backdrop, one question remains: do international sanctions help us to heal the diseases that are now so nationally ingrained? We say no! But they provide opportunity to channel in the right political direction. That direction has only one bearing, one destination: to the table of conversation, to arm’s length engagement, to some vision that lifts us out of the current elections disasters.
Local voices have emerged from the heavy static to insist on a new model. As we have said persistently at this paper, the model we have dooms us to the follies of today and the sure failures of the future. It is time to figure out a different way, if only to distance from the lost way long travelled.
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