Independence: From Mathematics to politics

May 25, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – Independence. Sixty years of what should have manifested all the vitality of youthfulness. Grown to the stability of adult maturity. Then going over those hills to lengthy (hopefully) silvery years before twilight steps in, and the silence of eternity takes over.

Ask any two Guyanese what Independence means, what Independence has done for them, and be ready for two dozen answers. I try my hand, go on record. This is my Independence story.

I begin with mathematics, the unblinking unnegotiability of sharp, scorching numbers. The 60 years of Independent Guyana fits neatly into this simple, somewhat shaky arithmetic: 28 years of PNC, 28 years of PPP, and 4 years of a chameleon that went by the name of APNU+AFC. It’s 60, plus or minus a few months here, and a year or so there. The math is neat. The politics is ugly. In the terminology favoured by those at the top, those who have lost their moral marbles, who pawned their ethical energies, it is ‘Stink and Dutty.’ It is a part of the New Guyana English Dictionary, the pages of which keep multiplying. Ugly and stink and ‘dutty’ is 28 years of PNC darkness (to which I add madness and utter foolishness).

Twenty-eight years of darkness was and still is the PPP’s Independence anthem. Ugly and obscene was 28 years of PPP unscrupulousness, deviousness, and pompousness, which has just been honoured with a new lease on life, and the means to extend its leadership vulgarities. The PNC has lost its rhythm and is still trying to shake the blues. It is left to a peasant like me to define the PPP’s reign, which I just compressed. Then, the APNU+AFC clawed its way into the Independence frame. It presided over a sickness and delivered crippling sloppiness that made flunkeys and lackeys of all Guyanese, save for those in duty-free cars and their turreted, airconditioned, plantation houses. The largest plantation mansions belong to Guyana’s new voracious landlords. Prado-Ville is a current address, and Silica City one in the making.

When the Union Jack went down, the Golden Arrowhead went up. Since then, most Guyanese got shot to pieces and scattered all over in controlled disarray. The best and brightest fled. The middleclass hit by a hurricane, from which it hasn’t, maybe can’t, recover. Which society can aspire to greatness, when its human capital haemorrhages away? When old capital took flight from the 1960s, new capital bubbled up from below the sea starting six years ago. The catastrophe of Guyana is that the new capital ended up in the hands of the worst scoundrels since Madoff and Adolph. Madoff calculated how to rob his fellow Jews in the synagogue. Then did. Adolph studied the Jews of Germany, then he separated them from their jewels, their freedom, and even their teeth. Wherever it is, gold has value. Madoff and Adolph cheated Americans and Germans (all Jews) out their present and their piles. In Guyana, the PNC was first, then the PPP, then the APNU+AFC, and then the PPP again cheat Guyanese out of both their present and their future. How is it possible to cheat a whole population out of its future? Call Freedom House and State House, and mention my name. I did warn that the politics is ugly, unconscious to scruples.

Time to lean over to economics. Men cursed 2%, cursed the hands that made no taxes, cursed no ringfencing. Today, they cry the curse of sanctity of contract. When vulgarity and profanity stand as commanding warlords, how can there be place for sanctity? I’ll be damned and doubly damned any day that I succumb to that abomination, that antichrist. Sanctity of contract is the epitome of what is unholy. Of what is naked and scarred and oozing the putrid. If only there was a Guyanese leader who would stand before Exxon, before ambassadors, and before other principals and use those same exact words that I repeat now to ram the point home. Sanctity of contract is an abomination, the antichrist. Sanctity is national blasphemy, it is ugly and unholy, an utterly putrid revulsion.

Now that would be men of free and independent spirit, speaking from the hallowed soil of a truly Independent Guyana. Guyanese have been hurt by too many of those they love, observing them as they turn traitorous. Independence is not of the gamesmanship of ‘Essequibo is Ours.’ Independence is of standing tall, and facing one and all and taking on oath written in blood. This wealth belongs to all Guyanese, and damn those who partner with local turncoats to cheat the people of the true and full value of their inheritance.

I would say to my dying day that that is the spirit, the nerve, in the blood of independent men and women. Those who’re really free. Those who value freedom in all of its small and enormous splendours. It is the human formula that proves and proves again, what Independence and national sovereignty are all about.

(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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• adult maturity, GHK Lall, independence, mathematics, Politics

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