Just what is going on in Guyana?

May 13, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There was a time when the average Guyanese scandal involved a man stealing two plantains from a neighbour’s kitchen garden and then attending the same neighbour’s wake three weeks later pretending to be grief-stricken. We were a manageable people. Dysfunction arrived in small, charming doses. Now, however, one opens social media with the same dread that medieval peasants reserved for the arrival of locusts.

Just what is going on in Guyana?

The latest evidence that our nation is wobbling on loose hinges comes in the form of two videos circulating online. The first is so disturbing that even my neuroses developed a nervous condition. It shows a child being brutally whipped by an adult—reportedly a parent or guardian—while other people stand around cheering with the enthusiasm of spectators at a prizefight. One almost expected someone to begin selling snow cones and peanuts in the background.

This was not discipline. This was violence performed as entertainment.

By now, the authorities should have intervened with the urgency of the GRA and the police going after the Mohammeds. The identity of the child and the aggressor should already have been established. The child should have been removed from that environment immediately because no human being, much less a child, should have to live among people who think brutality is a legitimate part of parenting.

And the person administering that beating should have been arrested and placed before the courts. Tell me this is happening. Please. Lie to me if necessary. I have reached the age where comforting fiction has medicinal value.

What unsettles one most is not simply the violence itself but the attitude surrounding it. The unbridled joy of those looking on at seeing a child terrified. The laughter. The approval. It is one thing for society to produce cruel people. History has always managed that with depressing efficiency. But when cruelty becomes a spectator sport, civilisation begins to resemble a bus with no brakes.

Psychologists, of course, have long argued that adult behaviour is often rooted in childhood experiences. An entire profession has been built around helping grown men understand why they become anxious whenever they see a leather belt. Childhood shapes emotional responses, conflict resolution, self-worth and attitudes toward violence. A child repeatedly exposed to brutality may grow up believing that violence is normal, deserved or even necessary.

And then society acts surprised twenty years later when somebody settles an argument over a parking space with a cutlass.

You cannot plant cassava and expect mangoes. A child raised in terror does not magically emerge into adulthood quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Trauma has consequences. Violence reproduces itself with the efficiency of photocopy machines.

The second video is less horrifying but equally revealing in its own way. It shows a family dumping garbage onto a neighbour’s parapet while the neighbour, out of the view of the camera, protests. The sheer presumptuousness is breathtaking. Not content with producing garbage, they apparently decided to export it as well, like a small domestic version of international waste trafficking. This is arrogance elevated to an art form.

The neighbour objects, naturally, because most people are strangely old-fashioned about having piles of garbage deposited in front of their homes. Yet the dumpers proceed with the confidence of people convinced that the laws of sanitation apply only to other citizens.

One hopes the authorities move swiftly to compel the offenders to clean the area and dispose of the waste properly, and to institute legal action as a deterrent to this form of indiscriminate dumping becoming a fad. Because if we reach the point where people feel entitled to convert a neighbour’s parapet into a municipal landfill, then we may as well abandon urban planning altogether.

What links these two incidents is not simply bad behaviour. It is a deeper social disease: the erosion of boundaries. People no longer seem to recognise limits—limits on violence, limits on selfishness, limits on what one human being should inflict upon another.

We are becoming a society where some people believe that because they can do something, they therefore should. Beat a child mercilessly? Why not. Dump garbage on somebody else’s property? Certainly. Next week perhaps we shall see a man parking a truck in his neighbour’s living room because “space deh deh.”

And this is why laws alone are never enough. A country survives not merely because of regulations but because of shared standards of decency. The police cannot stand in every yard. Courts cannot supervise every household quarrel. Society depends upon citizens possessing an internal alarm system that says: “This is wrong. This is shameful. This must stop.”

The frightening thing is that in these videos, that alarm system appears to be malfunctioning.

So again, one asks: just what is going on in Guyana?

Because if cruelty becomes amusement and selfishness becomes entitlement, then the problem is no longer merely legal. It becomes a way of life. And lifestyles are far harder to clean up than garbage on a parapet.

(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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• GRA, Guyana, Guyanese scandal, Peeping Tom

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