Guyanese – we must have some self-respect left

Sep 26, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The descendants of slave owners now inflict nuanced forms of slavery and indentureship centuries later on the descendants of Guyanese slaves and indentured servants. It is called not slavery, but modernity, democracy, and prosperity.
We live falsehoods, history. Dominant tribal leaders, the slave sellers of long-ago Africa are alive, they are Guyanese. They are PPP/C and PNCR leaders, who sellout their brothers and sisters to today’s slave traders. The latter are hailed for their exploits, and in our lack of self-respect, we bow before those using us, cheating us, enslaving us. They tell us that they bring modernity, democracy, and prosperity to replace our incivility, savagery, and chronic irresponsibility. Our greedy slave bargaining leaders sell us to greedier foreigners, for what our ancestors called bit n’ half.
The departed Coalition Government sold us out with a contract, not worth the tears shed, the mountains of spittle and urine heaped on it. They helped the outsiders who came in their airships to suck Guyana’s lifeblood. It was manipulation and division, and exploitation and production of precious natural resources. Is this not Africa all over again? Something of India, too?
Guyanese, this is the fate lived with, from a devastatingly lopsided contract. In its turn, the PPP/C proved itself as good, if not worse, in matching the wastages that doom Guyana, as become more apparent daily. The PPP/C’s leaders cannot bend over far enough and quick enough to get kicked repeatedly by the outsiders and of this they are proud. That is, when they decide to speak, to tell the nation more blatant lies.
We say we have self-respect, but with all our education and exposures, we are helpless, and we like it. What our enslaved and indentured forbears did not have, no chance of getting, we have, and have no excuse. Yet we are more passive and limited than they ever could have been. Ours is self-inflicted, theirs was the weight of circumstances. The outsiders laugh at us, and the best we can do is fling dirt at each other. Wither self-respect, shame?
When opportunity came to level the playing field in Guyana’s favour, the strongest, loudest, and baddest tribal chief, the Vice President, is a sorry shadow, a pathetic figure joining forces with the slave traders, who rip our lands, rob our peoples, run with our riches. He refuses to move, will not touch, improve, anything that could benefit Guyana. Not even when opportunities were there, as carried repeatedly by this publication. He sells out citizens and supporters, while engineering a presidency and a dirty army to follow his lead. Thus, we have today’s haughty Guyanese house slaves.
The Coalition first, and the PPP/C now, conspired and partnered with today’s external predators who conduct their warfare, not with guns and whisky, but through the legalised warfare of contracts. It is bloodless and clinical in execution. However, it is no different from the forced agreements laid upon the heads of many tribes of Native Americans by the hordes of land hungry predators that invaded the rich plains and prairies of America. Reservations were the collateral damage that sinister final settlement, inflicted on the doomed red race.
In Washington State, at Medicine Creek on Christmas Day, millions of acres of rich Native Indian grasslands were taken under trickery and threat of force, and warfare by another form, treaty (agreements cum contracts), compliments of the Great White Father that corralled peoples who freely roamed those lands for thousands of years. It was genocide first, reservations next. At Medicine Creek, the red race got two paltry square miles for almost 4,000 square miles of their sacred spaces. And, lest we forget: $3,250 to move. Is this not history repeated here?
Today, oil illiterate Guyanese surrender vast treasures with pen strokes. We rage against each other. Where is our rage when PPP/C and PNCR governments parcel out our patrimony without fair recompense? Where is that when billion-dollar mystery bills are ours? Reports concealed? We rage at the EPA, but not at PPP/C leaders, who ensure its friendliness, cooperation, docility. Civil society is slammed, for benefitting from today’s beads and trinkets: recognition, inclusion, collusion. Africa again. Guyanese: what about some self-respect?

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