The way we will be later today

Jun 22, 2020 Editorial

This nation hovers on the brink of overwhelming exhaustion brought about by the many frustrations that extinguish its energies. Guyana is in the worst of places prompted by the ceaseless prevarications that scuttle its hopes and spirit. We run on an empty tank, lacking zest and thrust. This is where we are perched on the tense tightrope, prior to the fateful Court of Appeals decision scheduled for 13:00hrs today.
We are depleted and so, too, are our politicians in the creativity of their electoral handiwork, their attempts to reconfigure present and future history, through the inexplicable and inexcusable. It is almost over, when one of the last doors knocked on for relief closes with a clear decision at some time beyond 13:00hrs this Monday.
From all appearances, this should be the last gasp of the coalition hoping for some respite, and for the new government signaling its readiness to come to life. This hard-hit country needs any life it can get, and never as in the current hour of decision and expectation, of almost a million individual visions.
The first moving question of the moment distils to this: how will the three wise jurists of the Court of Appeals be today? They are neither isolated nor insulated from the tempests of the times, the burdensome pressures of Guyana’s overbearing circumstances. They stand on the threshold of history. The second question coalesces around this contemplation: and how will we be-angry leaders, angrier supporters, with the angriest being disillusioned citizens-in a likely unsettled and hostile environment? Later today and the tomorrows ahead, will deliver answers in due course. It is our hope that they will be encouraging, if only to assure the continuity of this society to its long delayed destiny.
While we countdown the hours left to the court, we are aware that it is always unwise, the height of presumptuousness, to try to outthink and anticipate the way the minds of tribunes of spare legal truths work. Like their less exposed, less educated, and less saluted juror cousins in the law, judges can also be fickle, through the surprising, even the shocking. This is what the history of American judicial mysteries reveal, all the way from twenty years ago, in Bush v. Gore.
But today prudence is cast to the wind. We assert and advance that the room that the three learned judges have limits them to holding only to the preponderance of persuasive elements in the matter brought before them. In summary, it is that those elements favor the current opposition. Though there is absolutely no intention to ringfence or second-guess the two spotlighted sons and one daughter of the higher bench, what was placed before them by agents of the coalition is cut and dried to bring this whole sorry season in Guyana’s electoral history to a full stop. The signs and portents indicate the benefit of victory for the opposition PPP, as declared by GECOM.
That is the simpler one that waits for pronouncement after 13:00hrs today. What is not so easy is to project or measure what follows after the chairwoman of GECOM speaks to this suspended nation. She, too, could go down in history as rising above and beyond in the sternest of crises, and at the most pivotal time. This is the great unknown, how will we be when her work is done?
Political reactions are the first things that come to mind. Those will set the tone, perhaps temper the tempests that heave our social realm. A key starting principle of democracy is the leadership sagacity that instils maturity and responsibility on a sustained basis. It is our hope that all three will dominate because leaders cast aside grave disappointments and do their duty to the many peoples of this ruptured and frail society.
We are not privy to any special intelligence, but we trust that the sanity of peace will be the order of the day. Our numbing clashes have left us drained and vulnerable. The early first call is for all citizens to understand their roles and then deliver them. Elections forced us to our knees. We have the future waiting. It is time to greet it together.

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