Land of many reforms, but leading to where?

Mar 21, 2021 Editorial

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Kaieteur News – Guyana has long been famed for being the land of many waters. Today, it would be more accurate to identify it as the land of many reforms. The land is well watered with ringing sounds, noble visions, inspiring sights, which are all part of the new unfolding story of electoral reform. We need it like a cure for cancer, coronavirus, and all those other chronic diseases known to man, and which torments his existence. Thus, the EU comes to this dusty, sun-baked frontier called Guyana, and in the hands of its people is something about ‘electoral reform, the cruxes of its recommendations.’
We welcome the EU people and the product of their long experiences and profound minds. What it lays on the table is practical and relevant, and so much that is meaningful to the peoples of this country. We thank them for their efforts and their interests, their offers of a helping hand so that we can help ourselves. To get out of the sleazy racial gutter. To get off the shaky social ground. To rise above the slimy political environment. To reach for higher and better national way of life. Whatever the EU delegation brings before us, and places before our leaders, we can only sincerely thank them, for its members and work product are grappling and struggling tirelessly to assist us to get off from our knees. They do so by revealing to us that there is a better way to go about these things, seasons, and practices called elections in Guyana.
The EU, CARICOM, the OAS, and the US have done their part to show us some light, a possible keyhole view towards a fulsome future. However, do we want to, really want to do so and be there, deep down within our sordid spirits and sick souls? We have had documentation and expert guidance before, but those have led us nowhere, and somehow always seem to bring us right back to the same place from which we started. From where we started, in some determined fashion, as an individual, as a tribe, as a collection of tribes, and as a nation consisting of those hostile and countenance-distorted tribes.
Outsiders can come here for the rest of their lives holding our hands and clearing our heads. They can offer the best of medicines and tonics with the best prospects of curing our acute social ills and woes. They can come with the best of intentions to point the way forward for us, even lead us part of the way. But, we at this paper ask this again: do we want to do so and be so? To go where such electoral reform provisions and recommendations can take us?
The foreigners can only take us so far. After that, we have to dig deep and discover within ourselves to the broadest possible expanse that we have what it takes to take the first baby steps to carry us the rest of the way. Thus far, in the still youthful life of this nation, we have manifested a remarkable reluctance to venture into that first fresh blush of reform and possible renewal; of the renewal that comes from reinvigoration, which could, who knows, lead to some shape through some sliver, of restoration.
It has now come to light in all of its deep details, those EU recommendations that could lead to authentic electoral reforms, if we are serious about having such. What is delivered to us have as essences and imperatives, some things that just have to be. Not in paper form only, and not from the convenient and deliberately deceiving oaths of men, who are already busy figuring out ways on how to get around them. But about what we have to do if we are ever going to have the kind of quality elections that closes out with authority, credibility, and finality in a day, and peacefully powers all ahead for the five years following.
We do not need anybody to educate us about how we must manage the press, and the manner in which the media – public and private – should be configured at a structural level, or how its practices must follow certain minimal standards, but there it is (again). Because social media is comprised of such a vast space, and largely undisciplined mob, that is a more challenging pressure cooker for purposes of policing and oversight (but something must be done about that media and platforms). At the beginning and end of it all, it comes down to what is instilled and insisted upon by leaders (if they desire to do so) for followers to embrace. And on the pain of disowning and dismissing and ostracizing those who ignore or breach.
It is the same truth where the monies that are poured into our elections, with the last one being cake and icing, must be made to flow through the finest filters, with limits and disclosures, and laws and procedures to ensure compliance. We do not need for the EU or the Interpol or the DEA to tell us that a certain kind of abundant cash is a killer of democracy, a fosterer of corruption leaders, a conniver for more corrupt practices, and a contributor to a corrupt kind of life, that is of the most unimagined kind.
For sure, we do need many key procedural and operational steps, and each step before us, on how to prepare for elections, how to condition the cohorts of our citizens, how to manage the totality of the actual process on the day of reckoning. Believe it or not, we may need some oversight and some restraining presences on the actual reckoning of the votes themselves. We will agree to that, and welcome any electoral reform recommendation in such vital areas.
But the EU, maybe at the risk of sacrilege or blasphemy the gods themselves, cannot teach us how to trust one another. Or how to trust ourselves, or to work hard at being about electoral integrity. We have to have, and in unceasing torrents, the indefinable in leadership principles (not how to undercut with subtlety and trickery); the best in citizens responsibility (not resorting to the deathless comforts of racial animosities); and the sublime that comes from hearing the stirring calls to true nationhood (and not of self-satisfying ambitions in the same sorry saturating strains that cripple). Those are what we must have, must do, must be.
Let this last be said loudly and clearly: we welcome the EU, and whoever else comes with electoral reforms. What we go about doing with what is given to us will then confirm one of two things: we are seriously and genuinely ready to reform ourselves and our processes and practices. Or we are readying for the playing of still more self-destructive games. The EU cannot help us there. There are some essential things for which we are responsible, and of which only we can do. We just must. In our long forgettable past, it can be said with accuracy of each one of us Guyanese: “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues – and every tale condemns me for a villain.” We are of and from Richard III where elections have been concerned.
In the arrival and wake of the EU, every Guyanese should listen and learn from Napoleon: my conscience is the tribunal, which judges me. We must make that a mantra and to the highest possible extent.

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