Venezuela and Guyana, studies in forced harmony 

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

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall 

Kaieteur News- Though jaded from overuse, I still use it.  There are times when a picture speaks a thousand words.  To that I add that the same picture ushers in a million slivers of light.  The first picture is of President Irfaan Ali and Guyana’s Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton.  The president’s hand is outstretched and clasping, a smile of sorts gracing his lips.  Mr. Norton’s elbow is tight against his body, and his lips are drawn thin.  At best, it is a formal shaking of hands in a moment of national challenge.  At a lesser level, it is a forced encounter, one that makes Mr. Norton looks ill at ease, as if wishing that he didn’t have to be part of a public pretense.  The second picture of the two leaders in KN is cold.  President Ali has been in charge for almost five years; he has gotten more schooled with political finery, the leadership requirements of the hour.  Venezuelan Coast Guard vessels intruding.

That pictures are the story of where Guyana is.  The circumstances that brought them together, influenced their forced gathering, have been brought about by Venezuela.  It covets a big piece of Guyana, will not cease in its efforts, Maduro or no Maduro.  Guyanese need to get this in their heads.  Guyanese politicians need to come to that place, which informs, which compels: the house is too bitterly divided.  The national house is built on sand.  The house of Guyana doesn’t require too much for it to trip.  The pictures of a meeting, a handshake, a convenient smile, and a telling grimness conveyed much to me.  I don’t think that I am reading too much into that still tableau now etched in consciousness, frozen in time.  This country is in trouble, and it is yet to appreciate how deep it runs.

If I point a finger at one side, I am letting the other side off the hook.  Guyanese have had an eternity of that reciprocal selectivity.  Seventy years of uninterrupted reminding and mutual taunting leading nowhere.  If I must be the only voice that stands for what is different, then that’s how so be it.  Venezuela brings embattled political forces together momentarily.  But what of the sum of the Guyanese people?  Where are their hearts?  Where is their love for this country?  Or is the hating of each other so much more vital to local existence, that it conquers everything else?  Including that which has this country’s ongoing disfigurement as part of the national journey.  It is not a good way to live at any time.  It is the worst way to be during national ascendancy.

If I owned a newspaper, the headline would be: Maduro brings PPP and PNC together.  Caracas is the on and off again ointment that puts a polish on the wounds that fester locally.  It is such a thin, transparent poultice that even the stillness of a newspaper picture can relay that wrenching distance between those coming together under special circumstances.  I am thinking of a wake house, where warring relations gather in a shaky, uneasy truce.  If this is what I stare at when the Venezuelan Coast Guard steamed under its commands, then I weigh what could be as later this year draws nearer.  For beneath forced shake and smile stood glacial undercurrents.  Hostile may be going too far.  But to say warm may find me guilty of overactive imagination, strains of overexaggerating.

It is prudent to be aware that our strongest allies would still need time to deploy whatever must be.  It is even more prudent to appreciate that an incursion of some magnitude could happen in a hurry and cover much territory.  I speak not only of a river crossed or of land occupied.  I write of incursions that could possibly unravel the mental state of Guyanese.  Clearly, the leaders of this country, and every single section of the Guyanese people, have the most urgent calling to rethink where this society is, and what are its combustible realities.  Guyana’s racial and political deformities are its most dangerous enemies.  To continue in the same manner as before is a program for local calamity.  The national fraternal battling can continue full strength, with every appearance of intensifying; that battling could be with a difference.  While Guyanese drain their energies by torturing themselves, what is theirs could be in the hands of others.  One is a neighbour.  At present, there are those other outsiders, who call themselves partners and neighbours, too.  So, there is this great local thinking, this dependency, that they will run to the rescue every time.

Guyanese, especially leaders, had better be wiser.  Guyana is a part of a larger picture.  It is one that could change in a hurry, one that makes the current priority that this country enjoys become secondary.  When the appeals for help are made, it would be a tragedy to find out that the only ones answering are those right here.  That SN and KN pictures demand some considerable enhancement.  Political leaders know fully well what I mean.  Each one of them.

(Venezuela and Guyana, studies in forced harmony )

(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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• big piece of Guyana, political finery, two leaders, Venezuela, Venezuelan Coast Guard vessels

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