Hard Truths by GHK Lall – Niger – What Happens When Spirits Are Agitated

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

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Kaieteur News – Coups are a rare and rarer occurrence these days, with the extended focus of influential Western nations on democratic governments and a high premium on human rights.  At least that is what the Western powers of North America and the European Union aligned bloc of nations have made their public postures.  A few days ago, this was turned on its head with an army coup in the African country of Niger. Africa is a continent that has more coups than any other in the last half century, with Niger the latest instance.  America and Europe have articulated their grave concerns in different ways about this worrying development.

According to what I gathered from the skimpy reports coming out of Niamey, the coup leader, General Tchiani, identified the prime reasons for the coup action, as having to do with corruption, insecurity, and economic woes.  All three should ring piercingly with most Guyanese.  The claims may actually be so, or they may be what an ambitious army general cleverly uses as his counter to what sitting governments insist are the exact opposite.  The reality is that a coup has occurred, and a government, positive or negative, has been tossed out on its head.  The good news is that ousted leaders are safe, and that there are no reports of blood running in the street.

Regarding the coup itself, uprisings in general, I walk across barbwire in a mined no man’s land.  I abhor coups, their costs, their dislocations, their results, intended or otherwise.  Yet, on occasion, they are seen as the only remedy.  For, there comes a time, when reasonable, troubled, conscientious, and patriotic citizens just can’t take what is going on anymore in the beloved land of their birth.  Consider these.  Over two centuries ago, American Patriots had had it up the depths of their nostrils, and they reacted with spills into Boston Harbor, and determination to rush the exploiters back to Buckingham and Nottingham.  In the fabled British Isles, some three centuries before, the agitated took it upon themselves to bring an oppressive monarch to heel, and squeeze concessions out of his unyielding craw.  There is the Magna Carta in Great Britain, and Independence in the USA.  Citizens’ rebellion, or baronetcy revolt, those were coups or overthrows against the status quo coming about under another name.

I go further and contend that what Mahatma Gandhi led in colonial India was a nonviolent rebellion and, by the same yardstick, Dr. Martin Luther King powered ahead for a second American emancipation of nonwhite Americans.  Limited coups, to some degree.  Call them whatever, pleases, rebellion, revolt, upheaval, ousting, overthrow, they are all coups, or attempted coups, intended to interfere with, or supplant the status quo, however it came to be.  As a quick digression, and before any Guyanese makes a production of being holier than yours truly (I am unholy), Americans have made a living with orchestrating coups all over the world, with a series of ugly and bloody examples right here in Latin America.  Plus, there was one which the British backed, and the Americans led in this neighborhood in the late 1950s-early 1960s.  They still do.  Noticeably, the Europeans have not been too critical; at least, not in the open; or unless their interests are menaced.

Returning to Mohandas and Martin not a single Guyanese that I know of (including His Excellency MI Ali and the Hon. Bharrat E. Jagdeo) could or should have a word of objection to what I lay before our fellow citizens about subcontinent India and Jim Crow America. Because we have some of those Jim Crow type figures operating under the pristine shroud and virginal purity of contract sanctity, I can identify with the bloodless [to a point] revolts of Gandhi and King.  Often, they are inevitable, no less inescapable.  When injustices against citizens’ conditions-already grim and harrowing-are made infinitely more intolerable by their own brothers given the power of governance, citizens simmer.  When the downtrodden is further squeezed and shortchanged by rampant political corruption, people are enraged.  When economic woes are exacerbated by racial division, then ordinary people pass breaking point.  When leadership actions stoke societal tension with inequity, then democratic ideals and restraints collapse from distresses inflicted.  Even further, when there is the ultimate contemptuousness of smoothing over through leadership hypocrisies and pieties, then the boundaries of calmness and respect crumble.  Recall African coups of the past decades, and check their origins, as stated, or for what they really were.  Not all were initiated by the general staff.

Nowadays, coups are regarded as a curse and a cancer, the worst of crimes, by those with power in their hands, and their prosperous interests at heart.  Those on top should always remember something: people can only be contained for so long, fooled for so long, and used, misused, and abused for so long.  In Guyana, the PPP Government, full of self-congratulation, has killed the spirit of most Guyanese with corruption, insecurity, and economic woes, despite the presence of unparalleled paper riches.  In other countries, there is hell to pay when such is the case.  Somebody eventually moves, something usually gives.  Already, spiritual uprising gathers steam.

(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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• European Union, GHK Lall, hard truths, Nations, Niamey

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