When will Guyanese ever agree on anything again?

Oct 26, 2024 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

---

Hard Truths by GHK Lall…

Kaieteur News – Can Guyanese ever agree on something again?  What hopes exist that there ever again will be some degree of consensus on anything at the political level?  Though not a pessimist, and my betting days are history, I would place money that agreement may elude for the next 30 years.  Why 30 years?  Because the current crop of pols should be in their dotage and with the caveat that this country still exists as is known today.  Take this matter of the $100,000 election once-for-all payout.  It is the latest textbook case that says so much about Guyana.

The Opposition has claimed credit, pointing to its origins with Professor Clive Thomas.  I pointed to the same source on a program and in writings, if only to acknowledge the author of that proposal, albeit with different numbers, and even as I had harbored some doubts about it.  Acknowledging and crediting were the right things to do, whether for or against.  Now, the government, in the person of Vice President Jagdeo, has come forward to object to and dismiss Professor Clive Thomas’s lineage relative to the idea of cash grants.  Dr. Jagdeo is adamant: we, the PPP Government, were the first with that vision.  An earlier opposition rebuttal had pointed to President Dr. Irfaan Ali dissing calls for cash aid to Guyanese as a bad measure by any standards, for any government.  Notwithstanding the spirited disagreements, today there is no finger pointed at anyone.  For what reason?  But this must be said, for if it is not done, then the learning that should follow will always pass by and leave citizens gasping in the dust.  The things Guyanese do, the places they go, only dig a deeper and deeper hole in which to bury themselves.  While as a writer there is more than passing acquaintance with copyright protection, there are some occasions that hearts must be big enough to be comfortable allowing some things to be left alone.  What is the point that is proved?  What is the fatal harm done?  Where is the grievous foul that is inflicted?  I may have it all wrong, my head in the mud, but is it of such existential importance that original proprietorship of the cash grant transforms into a life and death issue?

I seem to remember that there is a multitude of hungry citizens, whose spirits are in no way confirming of the extravagant statistical calculations attached to their names, to their national heritage.  To the standards that should be theirs.  They should matter more than winning an argument, shouldn’t they?  The cash grant has its positives and will have the most of such positives when they are delivered to all who are eligible and through a process that makes all Guyanese proud.  When the poor in this country have a relief currency package in their hands, then the rest of Guyana is enriched.  My concern about the now much ballyhooed cash grant is that it took so long and with so many excuses made to justify not acting earlier.  Frankly, I do not think that it makes any leader, from Ali to Jagdeo to Singh, lesser to say that an error in thinking occurred, but that it is now being corrected.  Similarly, it would bode well for this society if the Opposition could get in their flickering jabs about timing and so forth, yet still have the courage and common sense to applaud the cash grant development.  Nobody loses face.  Nobody gains a vote.  At least. I think so.  Just as I think that nobody loses anything while Guyanese gain everything, including a new vision of the way that things could be going forward.  Leaders on one side cannot speak with a straight face about unity and one of this and one of that and expect to get anywhere.   The same applies to the opposition and its push for some form of shared governance, when the best that either side can do is disembowel the other.  Guyana will never have one of anything, be as one with the bigger things, nor share in the substance of anything, when these are the passions and the cultures that grab in a stranglehold.  All are left as walking invalids.  It has been so, hasn’t it, with few exceptions?

I may be in full exhortatory (preaching) mode today.  Somehow the sense is that the pews are empty.  That is, nobody is listening to any of this, for all that it means to them.  They are reading but that is as far as the interest goes.  It is but another marker in the tragedy of a country given so much yet forced to live with the irony of lacking in so much.  Considering the ebb and flow of the raging, mob-like cacophonies, the kind of anticipating and savoring that should accompany the one-off cash grant have themselves become tainted by the renewed wrangling, the endless edging for the ascendancy.  In thinking.  Of being right.

We should all try, if only for the better, greater, Guyana that we crave.

---

• bigger things, Dr. Jagdeo, opposition, President Dr. Irfaan Ali, textbook

---