Where are the guardians of democracy?

Jan 13, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – For five unending months as this society hung agonizingly on the edge, and in great nervousness, there were many agitated Guyanese gathering daily around certain flashpoints. It was during last year’s election impasse. They were around GECOM, they surged around Ashmin’s on the High Street, and they huddled around the Arthur Chung Conference Centre – some even wrote letters and other articles in this newspaper.
They were assembled in all these places with intense interest, and unrestrained energies for good causes, such as ‘free and fair’ and electoral democracy mainly, and for other ideals, including the rights of man. These were all good and great things in a hard time of test for this country.
But, today a strange thing is now the norm in Guyana. These great Guyanese, these noble patriots have all disappeared somewhere into the shadows that grow deeper by the moment. They can’t be found anywhere, except where there are good times, and great rewards being doled out, and lovely stories of what was sacrificed to get the just desserts that they now swallow by the gobs. There is a tragedy here, which makes it even more inexplicable and beyond the grasp, because it comes so soon after all those long days and cold nights in the open air, while they performed unpaid and unasked for guard duty.
Today, when there is this great oil robbery in Guyana, the patriots and other people who were so consumed about democracy and free and fair elections no longer have a tongue, have lost their heads, so they can’t think anymore, and with that it appears that they are contented. What they fought for was of more than themselves, but for the sum of the six races of Guyana in all their numbers. The result of that struggle has to be more than a bottle of rum and being around powerful people, who drop a penny in their pocket, while their peers grow poor and more pitiful in the forlornness of their hopelessness.

Here it is, that these stalwart Guyanese who were luminous for majestic moments, who stood for something, today stand for nothing. We at this publication will be so bold as to share with them, our fellows under the Guyanese flag, that democracy is not this cheap. Nor is free and fair ever made so foul by their hustling for any cheap dollar, their sheltering in any sleazy corner with sleazier leaders, who promise the sleaziest of toys and trinkets while a world of mistakes multiply and Guyanese are more impoverished for it.
We are more than ashamed, disappointed, embarrassed that this is the sum of the vision of those Guyanese patriots who congregated in this place and that, and shouted themselves hoarse, only for today the wonderful things that they fought for, to come to this.
Our oil is worth billions upon billions, and we are happy with what our poor Indian and African grandfathers and grandmothers called ‘bit na haff.’ We think that many of those long-gone forefathers would shake their heads, including our indigenous ones. It is that their hard and stormy lives were sacrificed to the cruelties of slavery and indentureship to till the fields and fill the ships with sugar and rice, and to dream that one day their children will be wise enough and strong enough to break the chains of this inhuman bondage, because a rare discernment came.
It was that they are being used, and their grandfathers did not bear the brunt of the burdens on their backs for their descendants to live with the same slave masters, but in a new era and for a new product that brings them even more fabulous riches. As our oil and gold and whatever else are being carted away, the sad part is that there are these new Guyanese enslaved. Those enslaved by a quick dollar who think of themselves as millionaires, but are nothing other than midgets with that kind of mind. Men glad to be used, for the opportunity to stoop.
Is this what democracy and free and fair has come to in Guyana? Pennies for paupers? A breed of the newly enslaved from leaders to followers, losers all? This cannot be the Guyana of the future, surely?

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