Election inquiry: The Guyana I once knew

Dec 20, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s political sociology in 2020 and onwards is not the one I grew up under. From the 1970s onwards, each morning you wake up, each moment of angst, each step taken on the political pathway you chose, you felt was an existence you wanted, was a journey worth it.

In that long past age, youth was shaped by the elders whose mettle was tested against the passage of time. Each instance of anger against the wrongs of the powerful, whether in power or with money, was a justifying mood because you knew you were being taught by the right people to do the right thing.

I look back at that world and I compare it with the Guyana I live in today, and I am happy I am getting older and older. What has happened to the glorious era that nurtured me and shaped my psychology to fight injustice?

I had intimate access to one surviving person who helped to restore democracy after the insufferable decades of rigged elections – Yesu Persaud. All the other folks that I looked up to from the seventies were either dead, migrated or had changed from the characters they once were.

I would visit Yesu at least once a month at DDL head office on Main Street. Then at his office at the Citizen’s Bank on Camp and Lamaha Streets. Our chats were always on politics.

A man that played an enormous role in the restoration of democracy had become bitterly disappointed in the type of governance he was seeing. His deeply moving chagrin penetrated my soul. Our talks were changing me. I was beginning to become like him.

One of the persons I respected from the 1970s was Father Malcolm Rodrigues. But I was never personally close to him so as the 21^st century began in Guyana, I hardly saw him. I regret we did not meet as often as I would like after I had a conversation with him in 2012 about my dismissal from UG. His thoughts were depressing about the state of political affairs in Guyana.

Malcolm died two weeks ago and I missed a priceless opportunity. I would have loved to hear his thoughts on how people he loved and admired betrayed Guyana and themselves by either remaining silent on five months of election rigging or in fact endorsed the rigging.

There is no other precious moment in your praxis than to listen to the reflections and frustrations of people older than you who felt that society had moved away from the ethereal pathway of justice for the poor and powerless and the right to vote for their choice of leaders, a precious value that they sacrificed so much for so that Guyana could have a life.

What will become of Guyana, I don’t know or want to know. I think age brings unfettered or maybe uncontrollable frustrations but there is a simultaneous contradiction. Age also allows you to mellow and cynically shut out the past.

As I read the daily horror stories from the Commission of Inquiry into the March 2020 elections, it is impossible not to reflect on one’s glorious past when one shed blood so that one’s fellow citizens could have the right to vote.

As the testimonies of witnesses penetrate the public space, there is no Yesu Persaud or Father Malcolm Rodrigues to talk to, to learn from them about why people do the things they do.

To date, only the Stabroek News ran an editorial on the testimonies at the inquiry. The newspaper analyzed the output of Madam chairperson, Justice Claudette Singh, and it was a devastating critique.

As a very young man, I was influenced by people like Clive Thomas, Moses Bhagwan, Eusi Kwayana among others. I was a willing participant in the activities of the Guyana Human Rights Association in the era of the 1970s.

Yet today, there isn’t one comment from those quarters about the horrifying stories coming out of the mouths of those witnesses. David De Caires, the founder of the Stabroek News invited me to become a columnist for his newspaper. Although very elitist and a throwback to Portuguese aristocracy of British Guiana, David was essentially a democratic person. I wonder what he and his co-founder, Miles Fitzpatrick, would say when they look at the kind of dangerous thoughts on ethnicity that the paper’s columnists sprout today.

David edited my pieces so I know many of the instincts in those commentaries David would never allow to be printed. A debating house in his name, Moray House, has refused to say anything about the no-confidence motion or the five months of election torture. Sadly, this is not the Guyana I knew as an inspired teenager.

(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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Election inquiry: The Guyana I once knew

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