Guardians of democracy have all died out

Jul 06, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

I look and listen, but cannot locate any of the former self-styled Guardians of Democracy. I thought they all went to heaven. Then a second reminded: all found heaven right here in Guyana. I congratulate them – citizens and commercials, comrades all – for quickly coming out of their political closets and exhibiting their self-serving natures, their narrow-minded politics, their ugly abandonment of what genuine democracy genuinely represents.

I submit that Guyana’s democracy guardians understood the fullest definition of that word to be about elections; elections only. Thereafter, a call and an audience leading to a contract. A contract sealing job, project, scholarship for family; and leader appreciations for blind loyalty and lovely devotions during elections. I think all that is good, normal, and to be expected. But democracy doesn’t end there. In fact, elections are just the beginning, one scale only on the big Guyanese fish.

It would have been inspiring to detect those same Guardians of Democracy continuing and amplifying their spirited energies to ensure some national benefits that are inseparable from democracy’s domestic prosperity. Or are such prosperities limited only to those self-proclaimed ‘guardians’? The same vigilance from those same guardians would have been helpful to assure some degree of leadership transparency. Or does natural resources and governance transparency, in the minds of our beloved guardians do not apply to President and Vice President, and others in the partisan carnival managing the treasury? It cannot be that in this vaulting Guyanese democracy, leadership accountability is a matter of slippery words and never corroborating deeds that brook neither suspicion nor claims of corruption? I would have liked to applaud our Guardians of Democracy for the decency to demand some degree of leadership integrity, any speck of governance honesty from their own. But I can’t. For where is that, and how could that be, when there is vindictive and vicious leadership, which does not forget, finds absolutely nothing positive or self-enriching from such abstractions as governance accountability or personal integrity? After all, those reduce money in the bank; they slow things down, upset the applecart of sly corrupt visions.

In recent exchanges with a couple of those guardians, there has been rueful acknowledgement that such is the leadership reality, and so are the results. But beyond that, there is no individual movement to call out, object. Those who desired to depart Jonestown were held back, those who railed were cut down. They are careful, so as not to be accused of consorting with the enemy. That would be me, and such is the democracy with which this society cohabits rather unsteadily.

As I reflect on this, I conclude that our Guardians of Democracy were all solely about these things: Money, Power, and, it must be said, Racial Supremacy. When a democracy houses these components, there is no room for anything else. There is resistance to discernments about political tyranny, or leadership depravity. This is the local heaven now occupied by Guyana’s Guardians of Democracy. It is revealing, isn’t it?

Yours truly,
GHK Lall