What Guyanese usually become preoccupied with whenever the country goes to the polls – apart from who will win the elections, of course – is whether or not the outcome will be attended by violence, race on race violence. It is race that, principally, is the dividing line that separates the country’s two major political parties and influences their elections-time decision-making.
They, the politicians that is, and perhaps many more of us than we might imagine, live in a state of denial. We have created various mechanisms to conceal the reality of race. One of those has been the creation of slogans that extol the virtues of common good – One People, One Nation, One Destiny, our national motto, speaks to the fact that it is our collective location in a single geographic space rather than where we came from that counts. Sometimes, however, particularly at election time, the true meaning of our Motto does not hold good.
Nor have we, the incontrovertible evidence of the problem notwithstanding ever done much more to address the problem than
