PPP government playing with a patient alligator

Apr 09, 2021 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

Kaieteur News – I continue to call from the wilderness. To PPP government and all citizens: we are going about this the wrong way, with great national peril promised. I urge wiser heads to prevail, even as I acknowledge the futility of my efforts.
PPP leaders play with fire, when they continually push the edges. This cannot hold, and will eventually bring many troubles. There is no great profoundness in such positions. Because what Guyana has currently cannot be contained democratically forever; in most gravely unsettled contexts worldwide, democracy is a non-existent check, an ignored, overrun abstraction. Most optimistically, our circumstances are that the best that the losing half of the electorate can expect are equivalents of oil, age old age pension handouts, which is unacceptable. At worst, it means that our racial and political demographic cultures condemn one group to the margins forever. No leadership oaths, no matter how sincere, can diminish that reality. Or the associated reflexive passions (and prejudices) that simmer, threaten to heave.
Editor, I submit that we have seen such harmful spillages before. Single words suffice: Lusignan, Bartica, Buxton, Agricola; more distantly: Wismar, Georgetown, and East Coast corridor. We have watched anxiously when small groups (Blackie, Fineman), even a single individual (Chamar) wreaked ruinous havoc; and, of course, there was that Mashramani jailbreak and the emergence of phantom forces. All were supposedly freedom fighting and crime fighting: the crimes of the state, the crimes of others. My point is that all those times, participants, and events confirm something: an organised and concerted resistance will subject this society to the greatest risk that democracy restraints cannot neutralise, nor sympathetic Americans help overcome. Collaborate and assist, yes; challenge and diminish, I think not.
As I see it, there is an insulted and humiliated opposition. It is not of less than two score elected representatives, but of more than 200,000 voters and their extended relations. They are outsiders, been made to feel that way, are treated in that manner. It could be ungrounded perception, but that is what counts, and nothing else. From an opposition perspective, at the moment of the biggest richest prizes in Guyana’s existence, its people do not have even a lotto ticket, or entrance stub; but there is expected to be contentment with listening to government declarations of how good it is (and going to be), while they languish in agony. To speak of togetherness against this backdrop, this overheated cauldron, is heresy. A damned and dead messenger results. Still, I persevere: no more words, only hand in hand actions. If it isn’t so, then we will find ourselves in the worst of places. For this fact cannot be denied: the opposition possesses the means, knowhow and kinds of assets required for challenge: it has the dogs of war, boots and commitments, the resourcefulness and resilience. Nobody can remain a patient spectator while oil riches elude, and oil developments exclude. I am not concerned about the PPP’s prospects; only the health of this society.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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