This Guyana

Feb 26, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Last Friday, this country celebrated its 54^th Republican Anniversary. It should have been a day of great national pride. The national holiday that is our own should have been a time of great joy, and with unfettered revelry to match. Unfettered, but still mature and responsible, as befitting a country and its citizens that are among the most watched in the world. Indeed, Little Guyana, long disdained and dismissed Guyana, has come a long way, and now should rule the roost, with the happiness and contentment of all of its peoples foremost.

The unsparing reality is that there are two worlds in today’s Guyana. Those who are on top, and with all the glittering opulence that confirms their elevated presence. They are the haves, and they have multiples of what are the richest portions of the national wealth. This tiny fraction in Guyana’s population is filled with those who know joy because they live with it. Their cup overflows with the rewards of this land, they have received more than they should, and they are all lined up to get much more. For them, every day is a holiday, and it is a riotous one.

But there is another world in Guyana, as lived in and with by the huge majority of Guyanese. It is one where the golden touch of the national resource patrimony has hardly trickled or seeped in their direction. Their circumstances have barely changed. Their expectations have not been met, have been forced into a state of unhappy suspension. They are the have-nots, who must speak not, who air their grievances, and publicize their pain. They speak out, or write about, or protest against, their cruel state, and they are subject to every manner of vilification that can be contemplated. On this Republic Anniversary there are too many Guyanese who are hungry. They are unhappy that when they articulate their harsh reality, they are profiled and reviled for exercising their constitutional rights to the freest expressions of their situation, and calling attention to their punishing conditions.

When there ought to be clasping of hands for the reaching of some compromise, there is curling of fingers into fists to deal one savaging blow after the other. The have-nots are not looking to live in the lap of luxury. What they yearn for is to have a little more, what is fair and equitable, so that they do not have to deal as much with not having. In the world of the have-nots, they do not have enough for the basics, and it is now set to be a seemingly permanent condition. Unless there is some wise yielding by those with the power and the purse in their hands. As matters stand on this holiday, the prospects for any easing of the circumstances of those in the ranks of the have-nots appear to be grim.

There is a greyness that characterises this country. The working-class should not be forced to exist on the seat of their pants. The masses in the Guyanese population should not be living from a paycheque that may only carry them halfway up the road (the week or month) to the next paycheque. Guyanese should not be living in that anxiety-driven, agitation-underlined, state where a considerable piece of the next paycheque has already been swallowed up by this period’s needs and demands. This should not be in a country that has economic experts from all over, and international institutional authorities, pushing their calculators and spreadsheets to the maximum, and with narratives to match.

In this Guyana, no Guyanese should be lacking in spirit because they don’t have. Because they are being victimized and pulverized. We have too much, and too many non-Guyanese are benefitting too spectacularly from what is ours. The fair share of the ordinary Guyanese man and woman, and their children has not been delivered, not received. This must change, must be battled for, must become reality.

54th Republican Anniversary, Editorial, Guyana

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