New beginning, or beginning of a nightmare?

Mar 22, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- Elections Season 2025 is building slowly but steadily.  The pace will pick up, could grow into one of two realities.  The dawn of a new beginning or the beginning of a dark nightmare?  Either way, matters pertaining to this year’s elections will hold some ingredients never seen before in this country.  It is a far step to take the position from now that Elections 2025 will be about the unprecedented.  As in uglier than ever.  Lower than Guyanese fathom.  Graver than this country’s people can manage.  It is mid-March, and that is where I am, from scanning the coast today.

The PPP has as big a claim as anyone on victory.  It is standing wisdom that the PPP knows how to fight dirty, has done so, and is seemingly prepared to do so, without limitation.  The season is not even in the final lap, and already the ruling party has exhibited a zeal for going the extra mile, openly displaying some of its powerful weapons.  Taxes featured recently; before that, State ads had its Thursday afternoon hour(s).  Live in Guyana will be refueled and unleashed.  So will the cluster of online news outlets to do duty and defend the cup.  By any means and whatever the cost.  What was shaping up to be a long year just got longer.

The PNC has all but said: no biometrics, no white flag.  It did Guyanese, particularly its ready believers, a favour.  Bloated lists have a built-in bias that has its own deceptive truths.  Only a loser of a political party would yield to such circumstances.  In boxing terms, a second development that causes a second knockdown to the canvas.  Who is not going to cry foul angrily and stalk out of the picture even angrier by then?  Out of the electoral picture and to where?  The Opposition has made its position very clear.  It is to defeat the PPP.  Though the usual language of politics, to defeat is to tumble one on one’s own head.  Interesting times are ahead, I posit, and in more than the normal manner.  If the PNC were to go along with what it has already called a less than neutral (a non-independent) referee, then to what does it condemn itself?  More pointedly, to what barrenness its people?  Whoever needs another five years to learn of the grandeur of a PPP-run government really is a good candidate for a post mortem.  Having carved out its position, I do not see how the PNC can be gracious and do the necessary, viz-a-viz, curtsy to what GECOM broadcasts.  This is ominous.

Enter the youngster.  The youngster is already a spoiler.  Not quite a showstopper, but definitely a spoiler.  He has some early numbers.  Is he the one, this strangest of all Guyana’s political developments?  Well, there is the baggage.  There is the US.  And there is a disturbed PPP brass.  The president has taken to tranquility; the top secretary continues with his weekly war of words to disguise his anxieties.  Plenty to account for, with many gaps; voters can start there.  Rather laughably, the new kid on the political block went to Essequibo, and a PPP luminary immediately started hollering about national security and Venezuela.  As party brainwashing goes, that one is as good as long-expired Listerine.  If I were to join the fray, the next billboard to come out of Freedom House could be this: he is a Maduro mole.  I am convinced that this is a real country.  The concern is that Guyana just doesn’t have real people, but a population of brainless.  One kid who doesn’t have a party, nor a team of advisers, nor such things as white papers, manifestoes, or a platform, and he drives mortal fear in the PPP upper brackets.  From what I have heard, his programme is simple: money for the people, and stop the money from being stolen, swindled, and siphoned off by the strongmen in the PPP upstairs chambers.  I think the new fella could be good for three to five seats.  He may not make it to the throne, but I see a kingmaker in its raw stages.

Now, none of this amounts to the sophistication of political science.  Rather, it is the science of a pending stormy season and sign language of the street blending into one at the same time.  Translation: claims of a PPP victory will be sharply contested.  In spite of-perhaps because of-census numbers, Venezuelan voters, overseas voters, deportee voters, and phantom and other suspect voters, a new chapter is stirring in Guyana’s electoral refinements.  A calm one, a combustible one, or a nightmarish one, that is the question.  The PPP has a ready answer: the last five years.  The record is double-edged.  Lots of money spent, lots of structures erected.  But who are the people mostly collecting, who are the ones forced to their knees, and then kicked about?  They are not only PNC people.  The PNC (or whatever it calls itself) had its turn at the governing wheel.  It drove over even its own people.  Now all these crows coming home to roost.  The people want change.  They want to see real money in their hands, have a seat in the towers of decision-making, and the backs of some vagabonds.  How they will get those, well, that’s the business of elections in Guyana.  I see some turbulence ahead.  Headwinds, tailwinds, and foul winds.

(New beginning, or beginning of a nightmare?)

(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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• dark nightmare, electoral picture, hard truths, Politics, PPP knows

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