Conscientious citizens compel corrupt leaders to flee

Jul 16, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Leaders who make losers out of the people who trust them are usually forced to leave, sometimes in the hastiest of hurried flights. It takes time, but the wheels do grind into fine sand, and they sift out the rubbish, as represented by national leaders who fail them. In times past, such leaders were brutally upended, whereas in these more civilised times, they are swept out of office on the energies of people who had swallowed enough, and couldn’t stomach anymore. They take matters into their own hands, and make a final, fateful stand for themselves, and their interests. At such occasional, powerful crossroads in history, the fate of doomed leaders is settled.

There are messages and lessons embedded in the passage of history, some local, some international, for struggling, frustrated, and despairing Guyanese, who have grappled with their own cohort of disastrous national leaders. In the long years of six decades, we have had our own line of leaders characterized by nepotism, cronyism, corruption, killings, and suppressions, and who made paupers of citizens in this incredibly wealthy country.

There was one who started out wrong and inflicted a string of woes on Guyanese, and to such an extent, that the people rose up against him. Those who sought exile elsewhere added their voices to the furious feet on local soil clamouring for change. It came about after a prolonged, costly, confrontation that was not without its challenges. A second ruled with crooked fist for years, until the door was shown to him, and out he went, while leaving behind a record of corruption and crime and failure that was to be surpassed in quick time. Then there was one leader that many Guyanese felt had it in him to lead in another direction, stand for what is clean, only for him to fall on the issue of right to power, and in the simple arithmetic that was the system used.

More recently, there is a tandem of national leaders who have compiled a still worse litany of crookedness and financial ugliness. They mismanage the wealth of society, and squander precious trust placed in them by the always hopeful people, just like citizens in other burdened, hurting lands. One is so skilled at deception that he not only gives his own new decayed meanings to old words, but he has also succeeded in splitting letters of the alphabet (like scientists did with the atom), and unleashed terrible dangers on a divided people. Listen to those ambitious and wrongheaded leaders, who came into power from the 1960s to this day, and the record emphasises great hardships for the common people. It was why they were then forced to leave the trappings and rich possibilities of power behind under one movement or another for the people by the people. It is just like what other citizens in other countries have had to do, still do, where the sufferings of society steepen and multiply.

Of late, it was Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka who was forced out under a cloud by the enraged people of Sri Lanka, who massed into one big ball of fury and the energy that flowed from that: get out, go away, move now. As known now, Rajapaksa had no choice, but to do all those overdue things, with a helping hand from his debt-ridden nation’s military. The Shah of Iran had his time at the helm, and it was the sorriest of times for his tortured people, who also had to resort to chasing him out of his well-guarded palace, and caused him to flee like the common thief that he was. In Cuba, Fulgencio Baptista had to rush out from his homeland, because his people had had enough of him, and the walls had closed in. In identical fashion, it was how African dictator, Idi Amin, also was compelled to seek refuge in headlong flight. The records of these leaders were one and the same: costly corruption and crimes against the people.

We have them in Guyana today, and if they don’t learn and leave their blatantly corrupt ways behind, they will find that they leave the people no choice, but to rise and rally against them.

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