The power of compromise

Aug 19, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Like others, there were doubts. Yet, the near impossible was achieved recently in the United States Senate with a bipartisan 69-30 vote in favour of the massive US$1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Something of this magnitude has not happened in the longest while in the thinly balanced US Senate. But Tuesday’s development demonstrated, once again, the power and reach of compromise, and the great many things that it can make possible, if only there is genuine interest in it, and the willingness to work, if not fight, for it.
It was never easy going, and for the last few decades the US Senate has been the scene of some of the most rancorous battles. But senators from both Democratic and Republican parties, as led by Krysten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, and Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, held firm to usher passage of the biggest infrastructure bill in a decade. Republican lawmakers are due some extra praise for their extraordinary courage to wrest free from the long and menacing shadow of their former leader in the White House, who tried to woo them to his destructive side, and who will not rest until he makes them pay for their ‘defections.’
Meanwhile, the bill still has to make its way to the House of Representatives, where ranking Democrats want more. They are making some spirited noises, but the expectation is that they will not want to be the showstoppers in what shapes up to be a long overdue Democratic congressional victory, and to give their party’s occupant in the White House something to walk away with, after all his efforts at working the aisles for some hard-earned political compromise.
We are thinking of how much that same simple word, but one so very loaded and nasty here, is needed here, and how much of a difference it could make here. We desperately need compromise to get anywhere tangible with reforms placed, or about to be placed, on the table of consideration. We definitely need some sort of compromise and adjustment in our way of thinking about race relations, and the approaches we bring to this thorniest of Guyanese arenas. We direly need some kind of political compromise to develop the degree of togetherness that is so vital, if we are going to put up a united front before the foreign predators that come here to exploit and plunder our riches, especially our oil wealth, but who are delighted that we remain deadlocked and divided.
We at this paper think that current political deadlock is a convenient ploy, which serves as an effective barrier to any meaningful compromise and, therefore, allows the Exxon(s) of the world to rip us up and fetch the precious parts of us away, while we are busy fighting and taking out each other. There is some instinct within that prompts to the belief that elections court petitions are a convenient gimmick and, similarly, the insistence upon removal of claims about “illegitimacy” before there can be any conversations of substance is a feeble posture, and also an unconvincing exercise to evade any seriousness to call Exxon and its partners to book, to seek some bending in favour of a better deal for Guyana.
Long before oil came into the local picture, words like compromise and consensus and cooperation were nonstarters in Guyana’s political culture. Our leaders are too self-serving and crooked to want to get too close to any such places. For any of the three would, in some shape or form, represent having to give up some part of the spoils, which is simply unthinkable, so greedy they all are. It does not matter that the welfare of the wider nation would be significantly enhanced, that a way forward out of our decades long impasses could be carved out, and then amplified.
Leaders in both their PPP and PNC and their lesser political brethren are all loud about readiness to compromise, but when faced with circumstances that demand that they deliver, they all disappear, because the individual and group corruptions will not allow them to do so. Thus, it has been no to compromise, which means yes to division, and yes, too, to more devastation of the Guyanese people.