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Elections and the “so called democracy” have not developed and liberated the Guyanese peoples

Aug 10, 2020 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I woke up this morning, August 9, 2020, to Rawle Toney‘s missive, in which he relates the threat that has been dished-out to him by his child‘s mother, a Guyanese of Indian descent. She refers to him as a “nigger” and threatens fire and brimstones on him and wishes fire and brimstone on all “niggers”, since it is ‘their time now’ and they have the power to do so, with impunity.
This exposé jolted my memory back to two experiences of post 92. The first was an exchange, on the pavement in Regent Street, with a senior PPP activist who unabashedly told me “is we time now”. That reminded me of Panday saying the same thing, at a political meeting at Hi Lo supermarket in Saint Augustine, Trinidad, in 1991. The second was an exchange with Hydar Ally, a senior PPP official. We were colleagues at UG on the Master of Social Sciences programme. We used to be engaged in healthy and objective debates, in the class, that included criticism of the then PNC government. After the change of government in 92, my attempts to have similar debates with Hydar Ally were rebuffed with the comment “we are in government now”.
Fast forward, Guyana and the world has spent the last five months in a state of hullabaloo over elections and democracy, in Guyana, but ‘Elections Don’t Matter’. Guyana has been constructed and maintained as a plural society where inequality and inequity were institutionalized from the moment the Europeans arrived and have been maintained ever since. Elections and the “so called democracy” have not developed and liberated the Guyanese peoples. None of the major contesting, and ultimately victorious parties, at the elections, over the years, have articulated this reality and sought to address the real problem that faces Guyana, rather they have been in denial and/or manipulative as they pursue their interest to the country’s and its peoples’ detriment.
CARICOM and the international community are not without fault, in this matter. The International Decade for People of African Descent-Guyana wrote to Prime Minister Mottley the then Chairperson of CARICOM, on the occasion of the visit of five CARICOM Prime Ministers, indicating that Guyana‘s problems are deep-seated and that elections only manifest the problem. We beseeched them to look beyond elections, if their real interest was to lend a helping hand to the peoples of Guyana. To date the honourable ones, with our lives in their hands, have not even acknowledged receipt of our exhortations. Similarly, after the riotous day and terrorist activities, post E Day, on the West Coast of Berbice, the United Nations Human Rights Council was written to, drawing their attention to the situation, which we considered to me a Human Rights issue being manifest at elections time. They too have not taken any action.
Elections and Democracy are well and good, all things being equal. In Guyana, all things are not equal. Elections and the “so called democracy” are therefore dysfunctional and only exacerbate rather than resolve our problems.
Yours truly,
Vincent Alexander

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