Where are other patriotic Guyanese?

Jun 14, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Our Sunday edition carried a story titled, “Patriotic Guyanese unrelenting in call for better oil deal” (KN June 12). The article had a picture, a composite, of Guyanese facing soggy rain and sharp heat to wear their placards calling for more for Guyana, for what could lift up all the citizens of this poor country, and put them on the path to a better life. We can have it, we are due it, this oil has made it possible.

The real riches of our oil wealth could be ours, it is within hand reach, but we are going to have to get up and come out and fight for it. To get what is ours, we must stand up and be ready to fight for it. If this means that we have to go down for doing so, then at least let us go down with dignity, in fighting for it against the might of the powers arrayed against us.
It is one of the enduring truths of life that what is worth having, must be struggled for. Such worthwhile things do not come to us on a platter, because there is always going to be somebody standing there to cheat us, either by deceiving us, or through trying to steamroll and overpower us. This is what has happened to us from the very first day with this oil, both domestically and beyond our boundaries.
Our own leaders in government did not put a sensible and straight fight for us. The Coalition Administration, now gone after five years, let us down; and, presently, governing PPP/C leaders have done everything that they can to pull the wool over our eyes and mislead us on everything related to this oil. It is why a small band of brothers and sisters burning with the fire of Guyana in their eyes, and the pain of their predicament in their hearts, has been left with no choice but to go into a prominent, well-travelled area of the city, stand before the public, and hold aloft their demanding placards.
Regardless of what is plastered on those placards, they are of the many messages of Guyana, and the pains that come from the discovery of its oil. It does not have to be so, shouldn’t be, but it is. It is why they raise their banners so that the world can see, and cry out for a better deal, a fair share, a rightful piece of this oil prosperity, that is yet to be ours. It is patriots like these few, these daring few, who make us proud, who fight for justice for all of us. They were braving the odds, and the wraths of weak leaders they expose for their failures, but if those are the prices to be paid, so that Guyanese can benefit, then it is what must be.

As we look at them, these simple and courageous and hopeful Guyanese, we are forced to ask about our fellow Guyanese not there. Where are our other patriots, the many that we are sure exist in this land? Many of them had expressed sharp disagreements (when revealed by this paper over the years) as to what we get, and how we lose. In the case of what we get, they had raged of how little it is; in the instance of how much we lose, they have lashed out at the waste of it all. That is what patriots do; they speak up and stand up, and they did so a few years back.
Given that little has changed today in what we give up and how we are exploited, we ask again: where are our true patriots, who had screamed their anger back then? A patriot yesterday remains a patriot today, for it is a compelling feature of bona fide citizens in weather fair and foul. The real test of real patriots is how they are when their country is held hostage by foreign powers. Exxon is such a treacherous foreign presence currently, and all Guyanese need to rise up in righteous rage against how the company impoverishes us.
Guyanese: go out! Guyanese: come out. Guyanese: raise placards high, like genuine patriots would do.