Dear Editor,
I look at Guyana and it is lost in a perpetual twilight zone and time warp. More specifically, too many of its officials and citizens are trapped in some place and time remote from the 21st century. It is of mentalities and a way of life characterized by secrecy; rooted in bureaucratic intimidation; enmeshed in cover-ups; and pervaded by the venal and vociferously vapid.
As examples there is the NCN pregnancy issue which now has crossed over into the bizarre. Then, there is City Hall entombed in a quagmire of ashes and garbage. That realm has its own King Richard III (one can throw in Richard II for good measure) meandering vacantly in a paroxysm of ineptitude, baleful defiance, and the always unsightly, if not unsound in presence. Next, in the wards and wastelands out there, there is policing that is just as heavy-handed and unsubtle (if not more grasping) as in the days of Thom and Austin. Truly, time has stood still here for the last thousand years.
Pick a department, or a government office, or some private enterprises, and most of the inhabitants are mentally a hundred years behind. Here is the real tragedy: they have neither interest nor intention in moving forward. Speaking of government, scrutinize closely and the harrowing conclusion is that (at the nucleus) this country has not had a single change of government in the half a century of supposedly free existence. In effect, it can be postulated that Guyana has always had one and only one government.
For PNC is PPP and PPP is PNC, when really stripped to the naked bone; the situation has been so, and is so, in mentality, vision, and practice.
The nation discovered to its chagrin, after a short span of time post 1992, that the PPP was really a reincarnation of the good ole PNC. As Justice Akbar Khan did say darkness descended upon darkness. And now mere months after May, 2015 there is the jarring disillusionment that the new government is a somewhat crudely sanitized version of the just believed buried PPP. In Guyana 2015 is the apparition of 1992, which is a mirror of 1964. Call it the adhesive warp of being stuck in time. Bile rises; vomit flows; so does nausea.
Like I said earlier, nothing changes mentally. What would it take to usher in change, if such is at all possible?
Black American leaders and liberators used to speak of a talented tenth. This nation needs an honourable hundred. An honourable hundred that will identify, influence, and produce an untouchable thousand (perhaps, ten thousand) and then spread them across this land. I am tempted to make that landfill, instead of land. They would have mountains to move, and if the taint of self-interest could be purged they could and would. That is, to extricate from the morass-clinging, pungent, crippling, that regards light, and the modern and principles as self-destructive, through eradication of the gravy, the honey, and the money. Take a look at where all of the sweetness has led.
We speed upwards (buildings); we rush around (traffic); we barrel ahead to maintain and retain all the dirty tricks and dirtier cultures of another time. Make no mistake: dis time is still lang time. For all the speeding, rushing, and barrelling, where are we if not in a nationwide parliament of panjandrums?
Where are we headed, if not towards a paradise of the foolish? Paradise was lost once elsewhere and unending pathos came. Paradise is lost repeatedly in Guyana, and there is celebration and self-satisfaction.
I seek and reach for the honest, and the result is hucksters. Oh, they will have a bonanza to sell and much to pocket when the gushers climb to the heavens. What will happen then? I remember Lady Macbeth: all the oil money in Guyana may not be enough to wash away the fossilized iniquities of locked immovable minds and of the tragedies waiting to be tapped. Incidentally, the oil rush and wildcatters are already on the move, except that the poor man-in-the-street does not know yet, given his usual place on the dim distant outside.
Overall, I think better can be done. There is just the small matter of money intruding, money that first tempts; money that then ensnares and cripples mentalities towards the personal, as opposed to the national. So, it is the doomed past over and over again.
To repeat: all it takes is one hundred honourable ones unfettered by ambition, unburdened by the lust for lucre, and unmoved by siren calls from any source. Meanwhile, today is yesterday. Tomorrow is yesterday too, given the unreconstructed mentalities that make for a frozen chronology. However, countenanced and complexioned, it has always been the rose-coloured prism of yesterday for those in the driver’s seat. Compare time and across time and it is the same conduct, standards, and outlook.
The rest of the world bustles to keep pace with the new worlds unleashed by the revolutions in communications and technology, and the endless implications of such. Guyana is occupied with its own revolution.
It is the same old financial revolution. It means this at the core: it is my turn at the top of the wheel now favourably revolved.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
