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Our Republic 55

Feb 24, 2025 Editorial, News

Editorial…

Kaieteur News- By any measurement, Guyana is a young Republic with many powerful attributes it can claim as its own. Given our relative youth as a nation, and the vastness of our natural gifts, each citizen of this country should be among the envied of the world. What should be, and what is, are two different things, with the most regrettable gap existing.

February 23, 1970, meant that we had just removed the last connections to the past, that long history of dominance by and subservience to great powers. At long last, after centuries of slavery and indentureship first, and the continuing heavy hand of a Mother Country, the children of Guyana now held the reins of control in their own hands. The destiny of country and citizens was now in Guyanese hands, and in the decisions that they made for themselves.  Naturally, this is with a wise eye to the ambitions of neighbors, and the powerful intrigues of those bigger powers more distant. Taken together, the latter have always had too much of an overwhelming influence on the affairs of this Republic before it became one. Unfortunately, some significant elements of that influence have continued under different disguises to this day.

Whereas we, the Guyanese leaders and Guyanese citizens of this new Republic, should have had the good sense to recognize and come to grips with the tormenting and self-destructive bone spurs in our backbone, the preferences and passions were for giving short thrift (besides lip service) to what was our biggest handicap, our greatest existential threat.  In the simplest expression, we are hopelessly and helplessly disorganised, divided, and devastating to our own interests, our future wellbeing.  This has provided fertile ground for the reemergence of those from the outside to exploit our strengths, our vulnerabilities, and our eternal insecurities.

We have always known our strengths, the great natural resource gifts that proliferate across our broad landscape. Though our ancestors dreamed dreams of a bigger natural resource bonanza, it was not theirs to experience.  But now that treasure is here, and as it is gigantic, it also reopens and ruptures still deeper the ever-festering wounds that our nationally ours, our vulnerabilities. When our ruptures and vulnerabilities are exposed in their ongoing brightness and sharpness before all who come, then we render ourselves ripe for exploitation of the worst kind.

Our insecurities have condemned us to wrangling and screaming with relentless aggressiveness about who should govern, who is fit, who has a right to, and who have failed on all counts, even by the most sympathetic interpretations.  Because we have been our worst enemy, the road was paved and the door opened for others to come running to the rescue.  We have since found to our alarm and unadmitted shame, that our rescuers had their own agendas.  Behind the smokescreens of democracy and ‘free and fair’ their objectives were about control and cashing in on our glittering resource prizes.

When we refuse to summon the courage, to grope for the wisdom, to free ourselves and be fair to each other, then we surrendered ourselves and our patrimony to the new enslavers of today. Though it is exhausting, it is never too old, to speak of being watchful of those who bring gifts. The gifts that came in the form of helpful presences, and a guiding hand, during the disastrous time of a few short years ago, have tied us, deboned us, and gutted us. Dependency is our norm, being dictated to, even talked to, is now the reality of Guyanese in this supposedly vigorous Republic made up of among the richest people in the world. We certainly qualify on paper to that categorization, but what is left out is how much we are also the weakest, and among the most foolish, in that we are not learning. Our leaders of today are only too glad to be servants in the kitchens of foreign masters.  This is what is heralded as vaunted leadership, viable nationhood, and the vibrant sinews of a Republic in the groove and on the move.  Indeed, the Republic of Guyana is in the groove and on the move, but those are certainly not our own, with us in control.

(Our Republic 55)

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