H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – One By One Sanctuaries Crumble, Anything Left

Jul 04, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Guyana’s Childcare and Protection Agency (CPA) had a world of hope and trust placed in its hands.  I regret to say that the people at the CPA had a bad day, one of their darkest hours.  Others have said it, and there is some justification for the suspicions, the fears.

I believe so myself.  If and when an entity like this agency can operate with a mind that is seemingly first dedicated to fulfilling the objectives of those with sinister motives (what is politically helpful), and we cannot summon the boldness and strength in us, find some trace of residual humanity in ourselves, then I fear that there is not much left as a remaining protective barrier.  When we cannot be about the fundamental decency to look out for the interests of a bewildered and bruised child foremost, then all else shatters on the altars of expectations, expediency, and excrement.

I have looked on as one thin line after another that separates us from tyranny has crumbled.  In the vastness of public affairs, public duty, and public professionalism, we have been victimised by repeated failures in moments of high need and across the board.  For there are few places and fewer people, perhaps already dwindled to none, who are girded with the steel of principle and robust conviction that some manner of wrong has been done, and only the right way, right attitude, and right attributes will suffice to get to unravel the darkness.  Convictions are boosted by the first sprinklings of evidence, sometimes miniscule but still revealing, corroborating.

What began to decline under Forbes Burnham took a nosedive in the last few decades, and at accelerating rates in the last few years with 2020 as the starting line.  I offer Exhibit 1: the Guyana Police Force.  I offer only a few more words.  All the parade ground bugles, all the public relations jingles, all the political angles, tangles, and strangles, brought the khaki line that stands between civilization and chaos to that most feared of places.  The first priority is not to protect citizens, but to protect the interests, visions, and ambitions of those running the show.  It is one shabby show.  A recent former American president would have described the show best using a four-letter word beginning with an ‘s’.  It has been that kind of police show with law-abiding citizens fearing, and politically connected lawbreakers celebrating another great escape from the clutches of the law.

Exhibit 2 should be placed in the Smithsonian, or hung in the Louvre.  A third tendril of thought is that Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum is a more appropriate home, such a public service horror it has degenerated into, a revulsion it has become.  Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency has earned this extraordinary distinction. Under impotent leadership, from above and below, the EPA protects the exploits of wanton and heinous exploiters, through being a primary partner in endangering Guyanese. In the GPF and EPA, the CPA has its precursors and standards.  Its values are identical.  When prime political interests and maneuvers take the highest priority, when leadership machinations and arrangements become unchallengeable, then not only adults, environment, and future are imperiled. The promise of the country, its tiny shoots and first baby fruits are subject to the worst of exposures. I point to the children.  Children targeted, children preyed upon, children ambushed.  When we abandon looking out first and foremost for our children, we expose them and damage them.  We do more than devastate our line.  We defeat ourselves in our own time and we destroy the prospects of the times to come.

When a State institution that is the domain of mothers, and one focused on the welfare of children, lose sight of, and touch with, primeval and celestial maternal instincts, then it joins the long line of the fallen in Guyana.  What do we have left?  Ministers parroting and pretending to maternal instincts?  If that makes the day of Guyanese, then go ahead, be Clint Eastwood.  The problem is that this is not cinema, it is real life in today’s Guyana.

Look at that public-private (but all public works) sanctuary known as the Fourth Estate.  Shredded, it has been, but for a handful of exceptions.  Politics invade, dirty politics pervade.  Truth suffers, a population labours and agonises. No sanctuary that fills a public space, that has a public duty, has not been vandalized, not been weakened and, worse, compromised.  Look elsewhere, and there are our houses of worship. Incentivised or incited into crumpling, mostly subtly, or when necessary crudely, is how spiritual leaders, people, have surrendered, almost without exception. All the karma, commandments and compelling suras have been diluted before new gods made of flesh, and to the new god that has color and texture. Money! Money!  Money!  When men and women of God shrivel before rank perversions and come up with drivel to justify their choices, then the last sacred sanctuary is lost. For if the Guyana Childcare and Protection Agency cannot be there in its most gleaming finery for the striplings and saplings in their dire hour of need, of hurt, of struggle, then what else do we have left in this country for safe harbour?  I say probably nothing.

(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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• Childcare and Protection Agency (CPA), expectations, GHK Lall, H@rd Truths, Sanctuaries, Trust

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