Guyana: violence increasingly seen as solution

Feb 03, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- Guyana is more and more becoming a society that sees violence as the solution to differences.  Though some are sure to disagree, there I stand.  Violence is what has seeped into almost every level of local society.  The Office of the President has had its share of participation.

The Office of the Vice President has made violence the cornerstone of its aggression and defences. And lower down, physical violence is unleashed on the unsuspecting, the vulnerable, and the powerless. From political princes of the realm to the peasants and peons in the population, take a listen, pause and watch, open a paper and read. The violence spills into the face of a savaged, reeling society.

Is domestic violence of a most barbarous nature making a comeback?  I believe it is, from the spurt of media reports.  A 16-year-old killed by her paramour.  A woman allegedly killed in her home by her partner, who tried to force an end to his own life by ingesting some poisonous substance.  He is hanging on.  Another woman maimed for life by her reportedly sickly husband, of all people.  A man in a bad state adding to his calamities.  A female murdered in her home, in what does not appear to be another creeping, numbing incident of domestic violence, but a routine crime, like the pensioner choked to death.  Serious crimes, two more fatalities in a place where violence stalks, menaces, sends citizens running to shelter behind grilled doors, and locked cars.  From taverns to thoroughfares, from city to countryside, from political leaders to social media, the violence takes on many forms, but always comes to a single objective.  Snuff out that inconvenient revealing voice, snuff out that enraging presence, snuff out disagreement.  Those who wish to challenge are free to do so.  Has been done before; they have their work to do, I have my calling.

Criminal violence leaves citizens cowering.  Leadership violence is intended to produce that same effect.  Environmental violence abounds and surrounds.  The swiftest, easiest, most conclusive way to settle disputes, misunderstandings, wrongs (imagined or real) is by violence activated in different ways, with fearsome tools, with results that are usually final.  The high places in Guyana cannot be exempted from their contributions to the violence that drive Guyanese to pound undesirable Guyanese into submission.  If from the political heads, then why not from the shoulder down?  A stage is set, a culture set in motion, a standard regularized that expresses itself – harsh voice, folded fist, descending knife, and the upraised firearm.

I regret having to point to President Ali, the national leader.  There is the First Citizen oozing threateningly, with words that match and an attitude that complements.  Want to mess with me?  Dare to disagree with me?  Question me, my political nobility?  Do so at own risk.  Unstated is that is the equivalent of playing with fire, and risking getting badly burned.  I am distressed that I must identify the Hon. Vice President Jagdeo, a former president of Guyana, whose weekly verbal violence sticks like a second skin to him: prickly.  Self-control gone; anger spirals.  In the verbal violence and hostile body language of President Ali and Vice President Jagdeo, I recognize a twin: varying size, different weights and strengths, with my challenge being who is senior and who is junior.  It is as if the they are trying to outdo each other, on who is the louder, bigger, and ‘badder’, leader in Guyana.

Citizens are neither blind nor deaf.  They get their cue from their modus operandi-that volatile, hostile mindset-that characterizes leaders’ reactions when crossed and roiled.  Is it the street rising to the level of the high State?  Or is it that statesmen (supposedly, artificially) have deteriorated their comportment to that of the raw and ugly street?  My position is clear, unsparing: when the top of society is so overheated, then the reckless and willing, the lawless and cavalier, come to think that if that is what pertains upstairs with neither correction nor restraint, then why should they be held accountable for operating aggressively.  Why the double standard?  Why, when all they’re doing is absorbing the local leadership culture, and adopting it as their own?

I hold immovably to my position: leaders set the tone.  By word and deed.  When rage-fueled words and incendiary postures are regular features in the conduct of political leaders, then it shouldn’t surprise that those take hold like a wildfire.  The ruling elite serves as the standard for the company of rogues and ruffians waiting to spring into action.  Against spouses.  On social media.  In the streets and villages.  With a drink in one hand and a cutlass in the other.  There is road rage. Wanna to push luck, see what I am made of, how much I am ready, and how far I will go?  Just try.  Give an excuse or opening.  The newspapers present the grisly details afterwards.

I am thinking how things could be different when there is a less bristling, less brawling, tone and attitude from national leaders.  I think that Guyanese give themselves a chance to pause, step back from the brink.  If they are this way, then so I must be.  In some things, not everything.  Being indifferent and inclined to violence-spirit, attitude, action-have their consequences.  Better judgment takes hold.

(Guyana: violence increasingly seen as solution)

(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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• aggression, defences, Domestic violence, hard truths, violence

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