Dear Editor,
KN’s April 23 headline ‘2012 Budget to be approved with no cuts’ has to be wrong. Must be wrong. Premature. Even irresponsible. If it is not, then this nation has lost any frail hopes it may have harboured. Hopes for change, hopes to lift itself from the depths of despair, any hope for tomorrow.
Is this the new dispensation? Then have it my fellow citizens. Have it all with the deliberately bloated project figures, the same compromised, almost non-existent, oversight mechanisms. Have the same craven, corrupt players, be they the elected, or the small company of selected scoundrels.
Is this the new opposition in action with old and now new faces? But the same old visions, old anatomical deficiencies, and new enthusiasms for the proven and continuing tawdriness of this administration? Citizens can have both of them – opposition and government.
Someone said this to me last week: The government and opposition, whenever which is which, have demonstrated a remarkable tendency to close ranks and become one when their interests are pressured. They have done this time and again, and it is never with the welfare of the populace in mind. On occasion, they could beat each other in the head with carpenters’ tools and fanatical supporters as the workmen; castrate what is not there; and abuse each other in the vilest of ways. But they always find a way to overcome differences, to mend fences. In other words, when personal and party interests are threatened, they look past unforgivable infidelities, and willingly share the same bed as one. The electorate is reduced to headshaking, open-mouthed incomprehension. Oh, they will talk about consensus, and country first, and democracy. They will be full of those reeking bags of you know what…
Perhaps it is time people get angry, real angry. Perhaps the time has come – is long past – to cease this business of writing and debating ad nauseam. Perhaps there will never – yes, never – be any evolution of the opposition, or the presence of a real one, with a determined focus on the people. And this leaves this besieged and forlorn society with very limited options. It knows what those are; they are not pleasant. Something has to give, the cat belled, and the unholy bulls taken by the horns. There are no alternatives.
It is clear that be it 1964 or 1992, November 2011 or April 2012, the more things change in Guyana, the more they stay the same. Something has to be wrong with this place and its peoples. Terribly wrong. Unless, of course, KN jumped the gun with an inaccuracy.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
