Guyana: a three letter alphabet country 

May 14, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

Kaieteur News – The alphabet that was taught and absorbed during our first days in school has 26 letters.  Whether the first inputs and insights came from the home or in the classroom, the standard has remained unmoving with those 26 letters.  Those letters have formed the building blocks for words and wisdom, comprehension and communication, from as early as three years old and last a lifetime, regardless of how long that is.

In special instances, the quick of head has grasped the mysteries of the 26-letter alphabet from much earlier than three years.  Considering this, something of startling enormity has taken over the minds of almost all Guyanese.  In a nutshell, the traditional 26 letters have been reduced to the paltriness of three letters only.  To minimize the 26-letter alphabet, what is almost like our own first and last names, is to degrade it to ugliness and monstrousness and, to emphasize the horror of where this country finds itself, I throw in barbarousness.

Get this straight: the three letters to which Guyanese should reduce, limit, encircle, their new alphabet are not O and I and L, as in O-I-L.  If matters had to come to this unavoidable place, then I would willingly endorse o-i-l to be the survivors of this carnage on the mind.  Given what the discovery of oil now means for the people of this country, I could subscribe to O and I and L being the extent of the Guyanese alphabet.  The trouble is that they are not, and it is a national tragedy, one of enduring proportions.  This is said because I now share what is well known and deeply entrenched in this country.  The national alphabet consists of these three letters: P and N and C, as in PPP (one letter repeated three times) and PNC.  It is the callous that feeds the cancerous which results in the disastrous.

I challenge any Guyanese, any outsider any observer, to differ with me.  PPP and PNC are where 95% of the people in this society are, if not as much as 99.99% of them.  This includes those locked in the throes of dementia, paranoia, hysteria.  PPP and PNC are where all thoughts commence, coalesce, and conclude. That is, for Guyanese who think at all. This has come to represent the absolute maximum in Guyanese thinking. Those who supposedly are content to sit on the local political fence still come back to the same dead end of PPP and PNC. Guyanese do not seek to look away from, look around, look over, and look past this gripping societal addiction. For the few who allow themselves some occasional room to ponder domestic circumstances, there is this assault on the senses: if a son or daughter of Guyana differs from them, refuses to stand united on issues, then he or she can only be for the hated enemy side (PPP or PNC). To bring oneself to think beyond that self-constructed mental torture chamber (or jaundiced castle) is the equivalent of treason, a betrayal of team, a selling out of tribe.  My God! Guyana is in a bad place, beyond imagination.

Mentally depraved, spiritually corrupt, and ethically deficient political leaders know all that I just penned.  It is what they leverage to capitalize on to gain strength to continue forward.  The mesmerized and used people know this, but are helpless to do something about it, anything to salvage something in themselves for themselves.  There is something that I must say in all honesty, and can, because I am not running for office, looking to curry favor with anyone.  It is that politicians and political parties have converted Guyanese to dumb and docile beasts.  Unthinking beyond the boundaries of these three letters, and unmoving from where they are.  Children learn at the knee and a sad, stricken new generation is born, continues the national three-letter catastrophe. The fact that I speak of this so openly and sharply makes me into the most unpardonable of subversives.  It is the biting irony of this country that the ones who savage the national mind and castrate the national will are held in heroic light.  Perhaps I reason, it is why Guyana has been rewarded with lavish natural resources as a compensation for the manmade ones.

In the manner of Guyanese PPP and PNC politicians, the oil people also know this.  They have studied the local situation on their own, shared notes with other foreigners (official and commercial), and quickly came to the one conclusion possible.  Guyanese do not have to be divided to be conquered.  They do it to themselves, which makes possible the rampant robberies and extraordinary prosperity from Guyanese patrimony.  Thus, the three letters in the alphabet that should be hymn and anthem and sacred to every Guyanese (o-i-l) have secondary meaning in the considerations of those who hold inseparably to PPP or PNC as their deity and firstborn progeny, if not their existence itself.  Guyanese, be they party diehard or cult leader disciple, are content to take their eyes off the oil, and concentrate ferociously and uninterruptedly on those held as blood enemies.  Meanwhile, the foreigners prey at will on this local Achilles’ heel.  Guyanese still will not learn, are unable, refuse all the time, to free themselves of their mental slavery that make them so pathologically committed to a self-destructive ethos, this national pitiful sickness.

Another foreigner, the one across a creek in the Northwest knows of this three-letter PPP-PNC State.  It is why he can extend citizenship to people in coveted territory.  He and his ilk covet the oil, too. And still, 95% plus Guyanese stick immovably to where they are.  Everyone comes and wants a piece of their flesh, and all the locals want is a piece of their own Guyanese man flesh.  In a recent gathering of one of the two three-letter groups, there was great passion in pointing to the enemy at the gate, and the ones on the inside.  This is while the real enemies hold the ascendant hand.  This is what the 26 letters in the alphabet distils to: PPP and PNC.  Absolutely nothing else.  All the money under the sea is not enough to eradicate that mentality.  When Guyanese cannot get past their three-letter PPP-PNC alphabet, then the better life sought for all will remain a mirage.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

• enormity, GHK Lall, Guyana, Letters, monstrousness

---