Unintended consequences, uneven environment, unbalanced character

Aug 05, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – From president to pedestrian, from government to private sector, from standards to mindsets, Guyana labors, wheezes. When one gets too good at the heavy-handed that often comes back with a vengeance. When the abnormal creeps into the acceptance of normalcy, splits are inevitable. When standards that honest citizens know are inviolable are given short thrift, there is a space tailormade for not oneness but division. From the law of unintended consequences to an uneven environment to unsteadiness of character are what must be endured. Consider the following few situations plucked from real life Guyana.

Fear stalks this land like a night prowler, haunts its existence. Guyanese fear their government, their leaders, and incurring the wraths of both. It is that dread of what could go wrong, if mouth is opened, pen is put to paper. Writing a letter could spell the death of a man or woman, not by the swift, neat, slice of the guillotine, but by the torture of a thousand cuts. Shaking a hand, signing up with a team, could get a man cast out into the wilderness (far interior) or, worse still, canned. When I say fear, PPP insiders spring into action. What fear? Sez who? Now that the PPP Government has done so well in planting and spreading fear, that same fear now comes back to leave it guessing.

How many are really with and for WIN? Nobody is saying, nobody knows. How many are so sick and tired of the PPP, its skullduggeries, and its cronies that they don’t want to hear of party or leader? Fearful silence reigns. Examples are being made of for the simple courtesy of a handshake, so there’s palpable fear of being made the next example. Due to the ruling party’s successes in beating citizens, most of all its own, there is no confidence in who is for and who is against. Recall that the voting process and exercise are supposed to be secret. Ah, the deciding factor, that unbreakable seal. Arranged busloads only extend the uncertainty. Built-up crowds at rallies only tell half the story. The call centered on “don’t split the vote” exposes the fear circulating in the breasts of the fearmongers themselves. Fear that is induced has its consequences, and there is that law that speaks of unintended ones. Which poll is the real article? When are the people polled not pulling the same fast one that politicians pull on them? That is, saying what is desired to be heard, what keeps in good favor. Four weeks from now, the knowledge bases will be opened. Guyanese will get a closeup of the damage that chronic fear inflicted.

From government I trundle over to the private sector. The private sector is entitled to its loyalties. However, it should never be so disfigured, lacking self-regard, as to be a proxy for any government. I can live with laws and rules, oftentimes twistedly interpreted. There is resistance, though, when a man in private sector employment is fired for exercising a constitutional right. Freedom of choice is one. Freedom of movement and association is another. And, though politics is not yet seen as quite in the realm of religion, a citizen is still due freedom of conscience. What standards when those are violated, seemingly nonchalantly? What value policies and procedures-whatever those are-when a citizen is prevented from the freest expression of a fundamental democratic right, a sacred constitutional right, and what I would categorize as a basic human right? Somebody in some bank simply urinated on all of those. Government should not be doing so, but given the shabby quality of what Guyanese live with, that is expected. But, not the private sector, and definitely not from any financial entity that claims for itself the immaculacy of a bank.

When the president or the vice president, men who attach ‘honorable’ to their names, slam citizens for daring to question them, daring to differ from them, and having the audacity to expose them, that’s not leadership at its finest. It is leadership that oozes of the bizarre, even what gives every appearance of dipping a toe in the worlds of the unhinged and depraved. What could be said of honor then, of some semblance of principle, however minute?

For the longest while the batteries of street thuggery and political hooliganisms came in for their rightful share of broad, consistent condemnation. When, however, the same thuggery and hooliganism are PPP owned, concerns and conscience flee. It is hypocrisy, not-so-subtle bigotry; and, intellectual fraud, plus individual deviousness. We are either against all political violence, or we are against none. Else the reality is of attracting justified dismissal of lacking authenticity and the fairness that Guyana needs so much. Burnham’s police maneuvers were roundly condemned. Why isn’t PPP manipulations, also criminal, lacking denunciation? Guyana unbalanced; environmental deterioration, tribal self-congratulation.

(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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• GHK Lall, unbalanced character, uneven environment, Unintended consequences

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