Governance or Vengeance

Oct 03, 2024 News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Guyanese are gearing up and racing forward to 2025 and national decision-making hour.  In this the last quarter of an eventful 2024, the equivalent one next year could reveal how this country lurches along to whatever destiny awaits.  Oil is the catalyst; it has neither precedent nor comparison.  Oil is the determinant of whether this country will be about civility or chaos.  Though shunned because of its implications, wherever there is great wealth and there is great inequity in its stewardship (perceived or real), disruption has usually followed.  Two words that are normally twinned are suppressed.  One begins with a ‘c’, the other with a ‘w.’  In the smoothest of times, Guyana is a heaving, seething, antagonistic cauldron.  During elections times, the worst that the citizens of this country are capable of take charge, command men and women to madness.  What will Guyanese have post-2025?  Governance or vengeance?  Vengeance is what has been dominant in broad, deep swaths; the occasional sparks of governance are inundated and swept away in the vortex of emotions and passions that never let go.  In many respects, elections represent a renewal of the quintennial cycle of psychic malice, visceral vindictiveness.

The roots of dissension and conflict could be said to start in the late 1950s, then took off with a bang in the 1960s.  The bangs of bombs and buildings crumbling, and citizens raging have never ceased, with the echoes reverberating to this day.  Next year will stir the embers, intensify heated recollections.  The departed have passed that on to those who followed.  Few are inoculated from the mesmerizing flames.  In every election in every place, there is some bloodletting in the aftermath.  People pushed out the door, places rearranged.  In Guyana, what is considered political art in some places now incorporates the strength of science.  Governance facilitates the practices of vengeance.  Without fail, all who were against are aimed at and degraded or demolished.  What is not diminished is minimized to a state of nonexistence.  The media.  The police.  The public institutions.  The civic presences. The characters.  The enemies.  They were against decades ago.  Today they have been neutered.  Atrocities are so many and so conspicuous that concealment is no longer possible. All the ugly retaliatory actions that went on at known but at less discernible levels have now been laid flat on their backs as if on a public operating table.  Everyone can see.  All can hear the rasp of scalpel on flesh.  All smell the blood.  The arrival of oil opened the eyes of Guyanese.  It is more than who gets and who does not.  It is the sum of governance as channeled and expressed in naked vindictiveness and the vengeful acts that bind the two in unmatchable spitefulness.

Step back in time to sixty years ago, and there was the kickstart, what has much to do with everything.  Five years ago, only rekindled and restored the flames of racial hatreds to where they were, which is at a more incendiary degree.  The learned, the defenders, the partisan, the porous of conscience and purposely poor of memory may all find fault with what was just stated unambiguously.  There is no yielding.  The environment does not allow such a luxury.  The oil does not uphold such self-deception.  The reach and revelations of social media bring the developments of the day, good and bad, and pin them into the eyeballs.  Who cares about the good?  The bad is what perpetuates all the obscene stereotypes, the bad energies the historical and gives it new life.

In this roiling milieu, there is endless chatter about democracy, fairness, equity, justice, truth.  Tell that to the women who were pushed out of bread, who were ogled as flesh to be sampled at will.  Tell that to the men who should have won a contract but lost, never stood a chance.  Or one victimized by a public institution.  Or one reviled by that riotous happy hour gathering called social media in partnership with state media.  One leader, the epitome of viciousness encouraged that, is even believed to be the champion and sponsor of such crimes.  Governors pretend that Guyana is about democracy.  Social and state media furnish partial but powerful evidence of what Guyana truly is.  With such high-octane toxins, this country stumbles into 2025 and there is insistence that democracy prevails, equity and inclusivity provide proof of actions taken, of actions to come. Tell a lie long enough and the teller falls in love with his lies and himself.  Brutalize citizens for a prolonged interval and resentments build to explosive proportions.

One man’s portfolio is about law and justice, but cataracts impede.  His restraining hand is feeble, not capable of feeling after all the numbness.  One woman’s area of purview includes domestic partnerships, which informs that relationships are unsustainable when there is always remembrance and repetition of who did wrong when.  The woman in charge means well, but is weighed down by loyalty, pedigree and timidity.  When the past is forever lovingly dredged up, then there is only one kind of present, and a future that is already in ashes. Another space that has to do with teaching is pleased to function as the conduit for what has dogged and devastated.  Nothing new and embracing, only the old gaining renewed vigor.  The timing is perfect: 2025 comes.  If the arbiters of democracy have little interest in getting local government on an honest footing, then the die is cast about what to expect at the national level.

Somehow, by some mysterious providence, it is felt that Mocha and Cotton Tree and Dartmouth would all be forgotten, that unexplained wealth will be ignored, and that lived experiences matter for nought.  There are limitations in fooling the people.  The biggest limitations occur when there is fooling of self.  Next year draws remorselessly closer.  What will it be?  Governance or vengeance?  Th opportunities have been missed for the former.  The latter looms large.  To some, another five years represent the inconceivable, the intolerable, the unlivable.  The first bell has now been rung.

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

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• crumbling, disruption, followed, Guyanese, malice, psychic, respects, vindictiveness

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