H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – ‘Father of the nation’

Apr 12, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I note with interest, alarm, and some humour the latest battleground of Guyanese over who should be ‘Father of the Nation’. To sober-up all Guyanese, I have two questions. Who would want children like these?  Which father in his right senses, with some residual dignity, would own up to be the ancestor of Guyanese, both of yesterday and especially today? I proceed.

I like the idea of Jagan and Burnham as candidates for ‘Father of the Nation’. Both of them.  Now, if that converts me into an incarnation of evil, there is no worry, considering the likely dark, twisted sources of such epithets. Now, despite my regard for both political Olympian ironmen, I lean more towards that other fellow: the labour man, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow. My word! With a name like that alone, that departed forefather is unanimous choice. Save for the tribalists. He has my vote, but for a little problem: I am done with voting. On anything.  For anybody.

Now I take the issue into new territory.  Why not a ‘Mother of the Nation’ in honour of fairness? Naturally, that opens a bag of scorpions about earth mother, birth mother, stepmother, blue-eyed mother.  Remember somebody beloved mother is another’s hated mother-in-law. We would then have oil, mother, and God in that order.

Next, instead of this clawing, jostling, and fighting over who is the best character to honour as ‘Father of the Nation’, why not put heads together and come up with a warrior for Guyana?  I make myself clear in case the slowwitted failed to grasp my drift (it is drift). What this country needs more than anything else right now is a ‘Guyana Oil Warrior’. Get that, folks? A National Oil Warrior, and I would build a statue for him, once found: How about an ‘Oil Father of Guyana?’

Also, just to be safe, secure, and politically correct, this includes any Guyanese sister, who might be a warrior like Queen Boadicea, or Abolitionist Sarah Parker Redmond, or PM Indira Gandhi, even one, such as Golda Meir. Any nominations from the domestic hearth for local elevation and this extraordinary encomium?  I have one or two, but I am not saying out of fear of those excluded.

Incidentally, I have a word of caution to offer my fellow Guyanese as they push and rush pell-mell into this newest hysteria about picking a ‘Father of the Nation’, a creature of rarified stature, and corresponding dignity.  The omnipotent Americans tramping about in Guyana are not going to take kindly to this latest local fascination and vulgarity about a ‘father for the Guyanese nation’.  They will be furious, considering that almighty America, God’s country, thought it wise to on pedestals, not one, but nine Founding Fathers of the Nation.  If America required nine (plus others of lesser pedigree), there is no way on earth that Guyana could only have one.  The math is wrong; the logic is upside down; and the reality is topsy-turvy.  With all our problems, all our troubles, and all our catastrophic failures that deepen to this day, there is no way that this green land of Guyana could have one ‘Father of the Nation’.

If that is what matters distil to, then it is sure to be some kind of an Indian Nation, or an African Nation.  Alone.  And, if that is found unpalatable to one side or the other, I have the perfect solution: why not an Aryan Nation, considering all the American and European swashbucklers striding like so many Colossi over every aspect of this prostrated nation’s existence?  There is the most impeccable Father figure to be found anywhere in the annals of Guyana’s torrid history.  My fellow Guyanese, for ‘Father of the Nation’, I give Mr. Alistair Routledge.  He has been benevolent, and he has been magnanimous, in the most fragrant (some say flagrant) essences of paternalism.

So that Guyana’s former colonial masters, the British, do not feel slighted, I also nominate Sir Benjamin D’Urban of discovery fame, and Lord Duncan Sandys who orchestrated this country’s Independence.  The PPP would be happy (foreigners embraced); Guyanese delighted (free visas).  The only unhappy puppy would be me.  As for me, “Our Father in heaven….”

Why not a foreign one as National Father?  I insist, since we are so enamored with things and people foreign.  There is the American Ambassador, how about Her Excellency?  After all, she gave birth to the democracy, and the Guyanese version of a Bill of Rights, that we live with now under the PPP yoke, and the PNC shackles.  The former could only move as ordered (check out oil), and the latter can’t move at all.

Since I have gone international, I would be most comfortable with a Guyanese of Chinese extraction, given how much that hardy lot has laboured here and the great contributions made. I do have a condition, though: none from the mainland, the old Red China would be fit and proper.  I will accept, however, someone for prestigious ‘Father of the Nation’ accolade a ‘local’ Chinese one of ‘Hong Kong Chinee’ roots as Guyanese used to call them.

(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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• Burnham, Father of the Nation, GHK Lall, Guyanese, Jagan

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