Protests: The power of the people

Dec 16, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – When governments get oppressive, some of the people band together and become expressive. Sometimes, they have no choice, so overbearing their circumstances have become. Their choices reduced to two: sit on their hands quietly and complacently, and do nothing for themselves, or stand up and speak out for themselves and their interests. When this is left to an unhearing government and arrogant leaders, nothing helpful, nothing positive, ever emerges.

The first thing that we wish to make unequivocally clear about protest is this: protests must be peaceful to have some chance of encouraging results. We urge our readers to look back at history, and how Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King went about their protest actions, and how much they achieved using peaceful platforms in the face of intense provocations, and relentless physical brutalities from officials. Also, protests must be well-organized, and well disciplined, if the issues and visions that prompted them are to come to some sort of fruition. Protests of any other kind do not have our backing, do not have much chance of long-term success and, in fact, inflict more damage than good.

The Iranians went out into the streets of Teheran and made their numbers and voices register in the ears of tyrannical men, and they were rewarded with a bit of an ease. The Iranian Government disbanded its morality police, and opened a tiny window for some light and fresh air to seep into the lives of their citizens, who had nothing left to lose. Whatever it is that follows in the next few months cannot be as suffocating as what was there before, and especially as it was felt by Iranian women. This is what happens when people can’t take what the State dumps on them anymore. There is a lesson in this for Guyanese being told endless falsehoods by devious leaders, relative to their mineral resources’ wealth, and how their budgeted monies are spent.

In China, a repressive and near totalitarian State, the government imposed a harsh and intolerable lockdown in some of its heavily populated provinces. After a while the Chinese people were left with no choice but to stand up and speak out in their defense, to highlight the additional burdens heaped upon them by the tough lockdown. It is a most feared undertaking, an uphill fight, for Chinese citizens to get any inch of concession from the Chinese Government, which is the longstanding standard. But protests have prompted Chinese authorities to give a little ground in Zhengzhou, Urumqi in the restless Xinjiang region, and with other cities set to experience more relief from the COVID-19 restrictions, described as draconian. In Syria, the Druze majority in the city of Sweida are out in the streets protesting against harsh economic conditions.

In Sri Lanka several months ago, protesters kept applying relentless pressure on the government, about its corrupt practices favoring family and friends, while shortages and crippling cost-of-living conditions left citizens hungry and angry. Senior members of the Rajapaksa government were forced to resign, then he himself fled. The point of these examples of people exercising their right to protest in the right way (with Syria new and different, and some of the others still in progress) is that when citizens exercise their freedoms in the most constructive manner possible, they usually end up with some movement in the right direction.

For sure, it takes long; calls for sacrifices, for governments all over can be just as determined to maintain their old cruel and crooked ways. In Guyana, the people here can never be truly said to have had a government that has been about what is in the best interests of all the people. Though the words and postures of leaders have been about what is nothing less than the best for the people, their actions confirm them to be the worst of deceivers. Now oil has brought out the absolute worst from leaders in the PPPC Government. It is now up to the Guyanese have to decide whether they will continue to allow government and leaders to dismiss them as fools and pawns, or if they will stand up in protest in the best traditions of getting what is government for the people.

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