The Mayor’s outburst and the possible consequences

Dec 18, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – A nation must be careful when ethnic/cultural/religious accusations against the president or the prime minister and government is relentless. They could be harmful consequences. The Unites States is suffering from the fall-out of extreme right-wing, racist hatred.

President Granger instituted a Commission of Inquiry into the Police Force after a man in a drunken conversation asked another to go and harm Mr. Granger. Outside of that incident, there has not been any attempt on the life of Mr. Granger and any important State official including Cabinet members during their occupation of power.

One day, I was coming down the stairs of the Faculty of Social Sciences at UG and Ronald Waddell was going up. I knew Waddell as a person to converse with. So I asked him why he was instigating violence in the aftermath of the 2001 election.

Waddell said that the police physically assaulted Robert Corbin. He told me you do not touch party leaders. The next year, one of the most horrifying eras of criminal violence descended on Guyana with important cadres of the PNC and WPA involved.

The Buxton mayhem, 2002-2006 is second only to the Wismar massacre. The full story of Buxton has not been told. I did umpteen columns on the mayhem for the Kaieteur News and the Chronicle but the full story cannot be told. But it could have been if President Granger had commissioned a judicial enquiry. But Granger never had that in mind because the PNC and WPA would not have survived the findings.

It was the constant call to hurt Indian people by Waddell and others that led to the horror of Buxton. Waddell himself went on channel 9 and told Indian people who voted for the PNC that in the ensuing targeting of Indians, those Indians who voted for the PNC will be offered protection.

Here now is the connection between the Mayor’s outburst and the role of subordinates doing violent things. I am postulating that the March 2020 election disaster has ushered in a narrative of ethnic sermonizing never seen in this country before. Two myths of two occasions of race preaching need to be disbanded.

One is that race rhetoric reached its apogee at the beginning of the sixties that led to the Wismar massacre. A research of political speeches and the newspapers does not support this contention.

What happened is that the warring factions used violent political demagoguery but the race baiting was always subliminal. There was no vicious vocabulary of race hate at political meetings and in the press. What the opposition PNC and United Force and their supporting media houses did was to attack Cheddi Jagan and the PPP knowing fully well they meant Indians but the barefaced use of race hate was not resorted to.

The second myth is the bottom meetings of the two major parties. I have not attended those secret gatherings but I know over the past 50 years, PNC and PPP leaders used the race card to urge their supporters to vote to keep the other out of power.

Since I was never present, I cannot deny race hate has not been weaponized at those meetings but if such vocabulary has been used and is being used, the effect on the public is dampened because it does not reach a majority of people so they cannot be influenced.

When ethnic demonization is in the public domain then uncertainties become the norm. You do not know when a person full of race poison is going to do something stupid. A sociological fact of political competition is that the leaders in the arena do not have to give an order to hurt a politician. A fanatic who has internalized race baiting can act on his own.

From March 2020 up to this day, opposition parties, mainstream media, cultural organizations, social media, non-Indian elites among others have relentlessly stood on the pulpit of race preaching.

To offer an enumeration will take volumes. A few should suffice. David Hinds urged Black people to buy from their own. Amanda Walton Desir offered the theory that PPP supporters do not think for themselves. Rickford Burke exclaimed that unless someone drive them off the road, PPP leaders will not listen.

A prominent African rights activist says that if the PPP don’t come to the negotiation table, they will be forced to come. Another said that they will break up the negotiation table if the PPP do not listen.

A school of racial preachers have birthed the theory that Guyana is becoming an apartheid state. A columnist in the Stabroek News says that Guyana has always been against Black people. In the Kaieteur News last week, Tacuma Ogunseye says he will support armed resistance. Enter the Mayor.

 (The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)        

 

 

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