H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – Local Government preview of things to come

May 03, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Opposition Leader Norton pulled back.  Meanwhile, the brink and the precipice are still there.  They are not going anywhere.  Mr. Norton may be, but not those jagged edges in the harsh local environment.

He started taking off the gloves; then, in a snap, back they were on.  Instead of a preview of things to come, with Local Government Elections (LGE) as the proving ground, there is pause for review.  I sense the hand of the people in the alphabet soup.  In Guyana, there is one alphabet, with only one letter now.  Letter A: A is for America.  No more of this irrelevance of a for apple or anancy.  A is for America.  To give the cap to whose head it fits, there may be an E.  E is for ExxonMobil.  Already, I can hear Guyanese children singing their new national anthem, and chorusing those two solitary letters in their alphabet. One more thing for Guyanese before I return to elections.  Notice the level of silence, potent unity between North Americans and Europeans.  Man! If only we could have a smidgen of that togetherness with PPP and PNC, Indians and Africans, and all the others that both of them woo into their parlor, or condemn to far corners.

For a brief moment, the PNC caused a clamour with claims of forgery and readying for rigging, among other skullduggeries by the PPP, (yes! by the ruling PPP) and this was only for low gravy LGE. My thought was if this is now, and for LGE only, then plenty must be festering for up the road in more strident, more close-to-the face confrontations, and more allegations and unmoving convictions that back all Guyana into the worst of corners.

Indeed, there is plenty at stake, and much to lose, in the bigger scheme of things, beyond LGE now shifting from reverse gear.  By my calculation, the last elections were never really over, something done with, and put out to pasture to die a natural death.  Rather, it lives.  And though the Americans may have saved the day, and led to Mr. Norton pulling back on the reins, there are all these undercurrents in thick, stormy layers.

Nobody wants to go near any of this, or talk about it.  But I do.  There are layers of anger, of frustrations, of resentments, and hard antagonisms.  One Guyana is a nonstarter, a gimmick that turned out to be a dud before it could be declared dead.  The President didn’t give it a chance: in one hand, he had carrots (visits, projects, promises); in the other, he held a stick (cheats, riggers, economic reservations for losers).  Well, I have news for His Excellency and citizenry, and it has to with more than LGE.  We have this precious commodity.  And then we have our settled mentality.

One set of citizens think that the one way that has been the Guyanese way of governance should go on like before.  The other set says that we are in charge, we won, and there is no other way.  In sum, who rigged better, gets to be the winner.  All of that may never have mattered, but then along came oil.  Trouble followed by waiting tragedy.  What should be the best thing for Guyana has converted most Guyanese into bananas.  No spine.  No solidity.  Only the slippery, just like a banana peel.  We stand for nothing.  That is, besides elections.  Now, elections are the determinants of who gets to control the national patrimony; the gold that we now have gushing up from the depths of the seabed.  There has to be a showdown at some time, somehow; or somebody, some segment is going to get left out, other than for a discretionary leadership handout.  Discretion over one’s inheritance is not helpful to good manners, better considerations, the best of relationships.  Not when oil is present in such copious quantities.

Not with a commodity that causes so much volatility wherever it springs up.  We could barely manage ourselves, hold on by the frailest strand of a chicken string, when we had nothing.  Now how are we ever going to be capable of maintaining this charade when we have these Yankee billions in one group of hands only.  Doing that is the equivalent of throwing up of the hands, actually giving up.  Somebody, sometime, somehow will be tempted to take matters in their own hands. Those LGE conflicts can flare when national democracy at the ballot box is up for grabs.

It is the democracy of steel: with its own language and culture, a long history of what drips and drips with what follows.  Charles Darwin had some choice words and terms of art to describe: natural selection, survival of the fittest.  Mine is triumph of the most ruthless.  LGE, however withheld, however watered down, is a precursor to what is in store for Guyana.  It could be a little shop of horrors, come 2025.  I have difficulty seeing Mr. Norton in the mix.  America is bent on keeping a lid on things.  Mr. Norton is busy trying to keep his head on his shoulders.

(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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• GHK Lall, Government, H@rd Truths, Norton, Opposition Leader

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