No Kings in Guyana

Oct 27, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – In the republic of mimicry that is called Guyana, where every new slogan or gesture seems imported, rehearsed, and flattened by repetition, it is strange that no one has yet thought to imitate one of the more intelligent American rebellions — the “No Kings” protests.

In the United States, where the idea of monarchy has long been a political profanity, men and women recently took to the streets to remind their leaders that no one, not even a president, may rise above the law. It was a protest of principle, the kind that seeks not bread or jobs or favours, but the preservation of civic dignity.

It is remarkable that Guyana, whose citizens have made a craft of imitation, imitating America’s events, slogans, fashions, and follies has not yet discovered that the refusal to be ruled by kings is also worthy of imitation.

In Guyana, the irony is that though we have never had kings, we have never stopped behaving as though we should. The entire political system rests on the understanding that one man, or one woman, must tower above the rest. Every government since independence has cultivated its own court, its own loyalists, its own courtiers and jesters. The current order is no different. Its kingship is not declared but assumed. It is asserted through innuendo, through the daily theatre of insult, through the public shaming of anyone who dares to speak without permission.

Each week, the government and its doormats hurl their denunciations at critics, journalists, activists, dissenters. The denunciations by itself would not be bad, after all the government has a right to reply. But when the denunciations is followed by vendettas and threats, it becomes corrosive. When the State is weaponised against critics, then we are dealing with oppression and suppression where criticism is treated as treason, and disagreement is a crime of disloyalty.

This repetition of contempt has become the rhythm of our civic life. In a small country, where the air is thick with rumour and fear, this constant abuse, followed by political vindictiveness has a purpose. It breeds silence. It teaches people to retreat, to look away, to wait for someone else to speak first. But we have been warned before: if you say nothing when they come for others, one day they will come for you.

The sickness at the heart of Guyanese politics.is the cult of leadership itself, the belief that power is more legitimate when it appears inevitable. Guyana has for too long lived under the shadow of what is believed by many to be a Putin–Medvedev arrangement, that cynical partnership where it is believed that one man rules through another, and where the exercise of power is always described as service. The result is a theatre of continuity: the same faces, the same rhetoric, the same assurances that we are “moving forward” though no one ever says toward what.

It is whispered, and not only in opposition circles, that power in Guyana is exercised by proxy. In such a climate, accountability becomes a fiction. The citizen learns that his government is not a system of laws but of loyalties.

The parliament, which should be a chamber of debate and dissent, becomes instead an ornament, a stage prop. The summoning of Parliament is now treated as a royal prerogative — delayed, deferred, as though the government were doing the people a favour by allowing them representation.

This, precisely, is why Guyana needs its own “No Kings” protest. Not because it will change anything overnight, but because silence has already done too much damage. The citizen who accepts delay in the calling of Parliament will soon accept delay in the release of budgets, the suppression of reports, the silencing of journalists. He will accept the dismantling of institutions one compromise at a time. And when he looks up, he will see that the republic he thought he lived in has quietly been replaced by a dynasty.

Already, the outlines of such a dynasty are visible. The same names, the same families, the same tight circle of loyalists and financiers. It is a class that calls itself revolutionary but behaves like the old colonial bourgeoisie — protective of privilege, intolerant of criticism, allergic to transparency.

The newspapers are mocked, the media is starved of access, and the public service is made to understand that loyalty counts for more than competence. It is a government that seems determined to act as though it possesses not a mandate but a divine right.

And yet, even as the country is being remade in the image of its rulers, there is no protest, no movement, no gathering of conscience. The Guyanese have become spectators of their own undoing. They whisper of corruption but do not march against it; they complain of arrogance but bow when the motorcades pass. It is as if, having imitated everything else, they have now chosen to imitate the worst of their history — the docility that once kept them colonial.

To say “No Kings” in Guyana would not be to insult the government; it would be to rescue the republic. It would be to declare that no one , not party, not leader, not benefactor, is greater than the law or the people it was made to protect. It would remind those in power that authority is borrowed, not inherited; that leadership is service, not entitlement.

Perhaps such a peaceful protest will come. Perhaps it will not. Perhaps the peaceful protest can take the simple form of those courageous enough to wear a T-shirt that simply says, :”No Kings in Guyana.”

The alternative is that we do nothing. But if Guyana continues to mistake obedience for patriotism, and fear for stability, it will wake one day to find that it has recreated exactly what its forebears escaped. And then, when the autocrats come for them, there will be no one left to speak.

(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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• Kings, No Kings, Peeping Tom, protest

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