Two words.  ‘No trust.’  They say all that has to be said.  I say what must be said.

Apr 29, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- On the placards, ‘No trust’ relates to the Guyana Police Force (GPF).  This is bigger than the GPF.  Because there are those who have the GPF where it is.  Those who have manipulated it, then misused it, to the detriment of Guyanese, especially the poor and distressed ones.  Tuschen is just the tip of seething resentments, the spark that gives Guyana a glimpse of what heaves beneath the surface calm.  As with the reference to the GPF, the eruption of emotion is larger and broader than Tuschen.  Maybe, wider than all Guyana.  Yesterday, it was Tuschen and the horrors surrounding an 11-year-old child.  Before that, it was Linden.  Guyanese fear a repeat of either of those two somewhere else here.  Where is unknown, until it happens, and then the machinery clicks to attention.

President Ali puts on his most solemn mask, holds the hands of the grieving, and works hard to maintain the right body language, as properly expressed, in its just-so-proper degree of care and empathy.  I commend his moves, now as smooth as those of a well-rehearsed dancer.  He dances into communities, dances through doorways, and dances into vast expanses of grief.  And subdued fury.  Why and how?  Why and how again and again?  This is where I start to depart from President Ali.  He is now less of a national leader, and more of a social worker.  Soothing the mourning.  Seeking to nurture trust.  Trying to pierce a wall of respectful resistance.  I don’t think that he succeeds as much as he may spur himself into believing.

Because when the systems of governance have been setup the way they are, maneuvered into the places they occupy, under his leadership, then it is inevitable that some of the elements that characterized both Tuschen and Linden will flare into the open.  The fury of the communities: depressed and destitute and distraught. Even self-destructive.  The lapses in GPF judgments, and their aftermaths.  But again, this is more than where the GPF went wrong.  The residents of those two communities deep down really were not too impressed with what were the equivalents of presidential night flights.  I am glad that he did, and gladder that the grieving families were courteous to the office that walked over their thresholds.  But this is bigger than the GPF.  It is bigger than the sum of the issues, areas, and failures that came into being under President Ali’s hand.  Bigger than Excellency Ali.

The inequity of double standards writ large and written all over the faces of Guyanese, held to be citizens of lesser standing, therefore of no account.  Therefore, to be pushed around and walked over and kicked about, like so many ragged, cheap dolls.  There is the unhearing and unmoving character of the presidency (that of Ali’s) to the cries of injustice and imbalance in the disposition of the ingredients that have this country where it is today.  For double emphasis, that unhearing and unmoving presidential and governmental standard is unconscious, until there is a crisis in some forlorn place such as Tuschen or Linden.  Before those, there was Cotton Tree, where two young men of similar strains were murdered in the most gruesome of fashion.  It was President Ali’s first test, and he is still to deliver what is convincing, possesses what people can hold on to, because there are some specks of the credible in his offerings, what follows.  The credible hasn’t been.  And, thus, his visits to the new hotspots of Linden and Tuschen reek of the same attempts to present the presidential, but which comes across poorly, merely a duty.  A duty to be done, and then quickly moving on, and leaving the same twisted systems of government to takeover and carry on, as usual.

When Guyanese hurting from loss dismiss the GPF, the thin line between order and chaos, then this country has sunk far.  Still worse, when the office of the local pathologist, even that of a regional one, is rejected out of hand, then the waves of distrust reach deep, taint too many.  I don’t think that the judiciary is looked upon in a more wholesome light.  The president can offer and promise, and commit and swear oaths, but few are the Guyanese that believe in him.  Or have the confidence that he’ll make good with a process that is clean, could be depended upon.  Lives have been taken, and this is where the survivors are driven.  For there is so little in what is given.  What could be given by President Ali, when all that Guyanese see are more coverup artists?  When all that is lived with are more tricky operators?  When there is only the usual, viz., more circling of the wagons to protect the government’s franchise, and its lawless way of managing the affairs of the Guyanese people.

 

To Excellency Ali, it is my duty to say: ‘sir, put the right people in the right places, and Guyanese could start to believe.’  Policies, procedures, and all those presidential proclamations pauperize the people and their interests.  Stir their worst fears.  Contribute to a torn, split apart Guyana.  No trust means that Guyanese believe that their president struggles with that hallowed title.  For after the visits and solemnities, then whereto and what?  Some may say that the more relevant, and quite rational question is who….  Who will be the next tragic victim of a State run amok, one without moorings, one lacking a moral compass?  It’s time for genuine leadership: authentic because it is sincere, one unfettered by the ills of regular politics.

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