GHK Lall was a member of the diaspora, and is a remigrant. He has several degrees and has worked in principal capacities in the legal and finance fields on Wall Street for 20 years. Currently he is a volunteer at a city school, and has started writing the first of four books.
By GHK Lall
The flavour of recent weeks reeked with the spices of enhanced collaboration and shared governance. The political principals aromatized the public with such enticements; with empty pronouncements lacking in seriousness; and with fatuous postures devoid of substance. Thus, a nation struggles for the political ambience so necessary – indeed vital – to realize its potential, even as it remains torn and quietly simmering.
A decade ago, during desperate days, this government was willing to listen and call upon others for help. Today, hubris, arrogance, and self interest have replaced that desperation. Today, it forgets the focused hostility to its triumphs; today it pretends that the same hostility that scorched the streets and villages and regions no longer exists, and that an innocuous obeisance abounds. Today, it mostly dismisses the seething discontent eddying below the surface, but which harbours evidence of undiminished peril.
Those who are willing to see, recognize the palpable ethnic distances amid the nearness. The groundswell of protests from earlier years has metamorphosed into a less directly confrontational and muted acrimony conspicuous in everyday walks of life. Still, the government takes comfort in its numbers, relies on the efficacy of its forces, and readies itself to absorb, and accept, collateral damage.
Here, in a society rent by ethnic distrust and contempt, the most urgent step of government is to promote beyond words and empower the powerless through participation; to transcend race. Yet, the leadership is bent on redirecting society away from the grasp of such a destiny. The hubristic and dismissive have come to characterize the government’s dealings with the people. It murmurs platitudes of enhanced collaboration, when it has no durable intention of pursuing any such undertaking with the obligatory vigour and zeal. There is only a reckless disregard for the anxieties and disquiet of significant segments on both sides of the divide; and especially the true state of ethnic discontent that prevails.
Thus it takes comfort in a phony peace; wraps itself in the phony comfort of a majority; and offers a phony collaboration that is transparently farcical. It refuses to commit to the first step, take the lead, or summon the magnanimity to partner for collective betterment. Instead, memories have hardened into hard-edged suspicion; along with fears of fearful ambitions from all directions.
Meanwhile, the opposition continues to grapple with wrenching internal upheavals. There is the emergence, suppression and dismissal of factions, and discontent with the leadership and related strategies. In terms of the latter, it is believed that cooperation has netted negative returns; that the party suffers from misdirection, and a more radical posture is needed. Hence, the pressure for change and movement in another direction intensifies and gains more traction by the day. For its part the government cannot be unaware of these festering resentments.
But the levers of power and the abundant fruits of office have thwarted any enduring commitment to change, or the required sustained stewardship. In fact, the very opposite has been the norm through the routines of deceptive postures and attitudes that undermine, or postpone indefinitely, the consensus of compromises. It would be well for leaders and the nation to remember Aeschylus’ words in Agamemnon: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
Pain and will and an awful grace encompassing a force field of harnessed volatility that is impatient with leadership intransigence. Yet, the blandishments continue in the face of political, social, and ethnic dissonances indicative of repressed tumult. Too many ask: is this a government for people like us? Too many others consider the opposition to be either wholesale sellout or wholesale threat. Where leaders should be engaged in what is necessary and right to overcome, they overflow with the complacency of the self satisfied. “It is the greatest of houses and tallest of tress that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder… They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.” (Herodotus)
Pride has vanquished memories of the uncontrolled rage at Lusignan, the clinical calculation of Bartica, and the swirling secrets of Lindo Creek. All indescribable in horror; all endless in implication. Each shoe retrieved from each bloodied collateral altar slaps aside the political smugness, and assaults the collective psyche. And if this is not enough, there is the spectre of officially missing weapons, and the known proliferation of an unknown quantity of sophisticated weapons; weapons aimed at a defenceless populace that this government has proven incapable of protecting. Euripides said it best: “Ten good soldiers wisely led, will beat a hundred without a head.”
Nonetheless, the fiddling continues and the resistance determined; they only fan further the flickering embers of discontent. Guyanese cannot look ahead to bridging racial gaps; they are confined to looking first sideways in distrust, then backwards in fear. They can continue to neglect insecurities; consent to be hostages; mortgage their futures; volunteer as pawns, and submit unquestioningly. As Guyanese ponder their political realities and options, it might be timely to consider the analogy of a divided house. It is one where enhancing and sharing have long formed the temporary conciliatory vocabulary of warring parents. The growing and grown children observing can believe and hope; they can retreat to the streets in waywardness; or they can take matters in their own hands and start out anew on their own.
Only the children of Guyanese dissension can decide which it is going to be: the courage of a new beginning, or continued engagement through their own fiddling. It is clear that the existing structure does not work, cannot hold. It is just as obvious that the political fiddling will not stop; now the people must decide if they want to continue to do likewise, or otherwise.
