OP:ED – 53 years as a Republic

Feb 23, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – After 53 years of existence as a Republic, Guyana should have so much more to show for that time, so much to be proud about, even boast about, considering our fabulous endowments.  In people.  In the fruits of the earth, and now of the sea.  In the reality of potential and possibilities actually in our hands, in how well we are now positioned.  Though I am loathe to acknowledge, after 53 years, we have fallen short of our grand promise, been a huge disappointment.  So much given, so little to show for it.

Half of our citizens, however counted, have foreign addresses as their home.  The most telling demographic is our youth, the vigorous bloodstream of a polity and people, only for them to live and relive the ancient prejudices and bigotries of their forebears.  It is what punishes our social environment, what tampers with our minds, yokes our thinking.  We can have all the riches in the world (and we do), but if we do not have the skills and smarts and strengths to make the most expansive (inclusive) use of them, then we are all the poorer for what we have failed to contemplate, prioritize, achieve.  We have failed to do so, haven’t we?

Our strengths have been neither ethical nor noble.  Rather, they have been of what is political leadership craftiness, and supporting citizenship cunning, that leaves us not as a Republic of sturdy proportions, one standing on its own feet and operating on its own steam.  But of a society that is the pity of the world, and one still a chronic charity case.  Anybody and everybody that is not Black or Brown or Beautiful Originals of Guyana’s earth is welcomed and embraced as our heroes; our saviors to point us on the way forward.

They have done so with one hand on our shoulder, and the other in our purse.  We call ourselves leaders and citizens of a proud Republic, an almost incomparably rich one.  Yet we are content to remain in this dreadful impoverished state, so beholden we Guyanese are to the whims, artifices, and contrivances of foreigners.  We were divided before, and with a whole lot traceable to those interfering outsiders starting in their pale strategies of centuries ago, and which became apparent in their putrid cruelties and social devastations just 60-70 years ago: Divide.  Devastate.  Drain.  Yet, being the suckers for punishment, the weaklings, that we are, we yielded again to their overtures and their maneuvers.

At one time, around that same six to seven decades ago, Guyanese were among the most literate people in the world; in the top five, if my recall is accurate.  The havocs of the 60s and 70s resulted in not just capital flight, but the flight of this country’s human capital, with its cream gone.  We ought to have been self-taught, transform into the best of self-instructors.  Unless we genuinely commit to holding hands, and maintaining a single head, then we become prone to the machinations of those who scheme over our property, our patrimony, and stunt our prosperity.

I exhort my fellow Guyanese on this Republic anniversary to examine how stunned our leaders are.  Look at how they walk around like controlled zombies, theirs is the stunted shadow of helpless sleepwalkers subject to the directions, the push and pull, of those who hold the strings of this Republic in their fingersstained with what is detrimental to our interests.  For us to remain divided and at each other’s throat is the best of all outcomes, while foreigners work their commercial sorceries, which enrich their treasuries, their own peoples.

I urge my fellow citizens across the national canvas of this Cooperative Republic of Guyana, to not look on neighbor and competitor as enemy, but as fellow strivers in the shared objective of a country of which all of us can be proud.  Scrutinize what we have and there is nothing about what is ‘cooperative’ in either our hearts or our visions.  Nor of a Republic reveling in its own authentic strengths, the beauties of its citizens.  Nor of a Guyana that is this economic Nirvana, this arcade of a social utopia, that it is made out to be.

Who we are and what we live with is a limping Republic, and all due to our willing prostrations before the alphabet soup of powers, who say they know what is best for us.  Perhaps, they really do because of what we have allowed them to do to us in this Republic of inequity, amid an ongoing litany of countless political iniquities.  In this Republic of Guyana that should have been, we could have been a contender for the status of a respected champion.  We relish, instead, being a perennial pretender.  Such is the graceless state of our Cooperative Republic of Guyana.  For whatever it is worth: my tidings to all citizens.  Be assured that they are good.

(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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• 53 years, GHK Lall, Guyana, havocs, Republic

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