The year is 1992. After an eternity of travails, a hardy group of men and women stagger into the Promised Land. Politically speaking, they are hollow eyed and emaciated; but to the last one, they are filled with the limp exhilaration of a monumental achievement.
They had endured the desert through despair and doubt and abandonment; they had persevered. The supreme irony is that this moment of triumph marked the apex of their achievements. Subsequently, it became a struggle to hold ground against external forces; it was one that would be won at great cost.
But there was also another fierce struggle: one of character and soul; one on the inside and continuous; one that has been lost and part of a very public fall.
For too many, 1992 is now ancient history. It is of a time looked backed upon with anger, the sharp edge of disappointment, and what could have been. A promised new dawn that died before it was born. Now there are only jaded days of stoic disbelief and cynical resentments. How did it get to be this way? What caused this spiral into decadence?
The return required the strictest adherence to the demanding terrain of the straight and narrow; the iron discipline of compliance in letter and spirit with the responsibilities of office. The potential for success rested on a policy and practice of zero tolerance for abuses or compromises of integrity. In sum, it was imperative that incoming administrations from 1992 forward be exemplary in conduct while handling the business of the people; to set impeccable standards.
But this was asking too much, and not to be. After 28 years of enforced wandering, it was time to party with reckless abandon through orgies of self congratulation and self destruction. The riches of Guyana became a political predators’ ball complete with a buffet of financial delicacies; reward for political endurance. The long denied spoils of victory had to be seized, consumed, and accumulated. Adam Smith wrote of “folly, negligence… knavery, extravagance”; these words describe the dolce vita present since 1992. The Huns had arrived; they got the goldmines, while the Guyanese people got the mineshaft.
Unsurprisingly, this ceaseless plunder has necessitated deferred and creative accounting, and eviscerating the recalcitrant, even when enshrined in constitutional provisions. As an example, cause the departure of a once heralded Auditor General from office, and then diminish scrutiny of the nation’s books.
Next, reconstitute quickly this constitutional office into a more malleable form; the precursor through the arc of time for further casualties, selected purges, and the inevitable universal stifling of independence and latitude.
To be sure, many have no issues with these developments. These are the same individuals who rationalize the more deplorable of the ruling party’s actions as defensive and a matter of political survival; in effect, the casualties and travesties of war. But who among the principled would uphold the obscenities perpetrated by those gorging at the public trough? That is, the enrichment of “our turn” (fuh teef) through the brigandage demonstrated with funds for the sick (Health); the dying (Palms); the high and low (drainage); waterworks (sea defence); and woodwork (housing), and many more. Only the boorish would overlook the signs of an a posteriori knowledge smeared with political incontinence. So much promise, so much promised; still it has come down to this.
A wise man once said there is a season for everything under the sun. Since 1992 it has been the season in Guyana for those whose turn had come to steal; a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. The republic is now a roosting place for a flood of fortune hunters unsavoury and unspeakable. Thus, the promise started a long, tortured descent into disintegration characterized by an erosion of fundamentals in accounting, in integrity, in public service, and in governance.
There can be little doubt that 1992 represented a crossroads, and that this government made a wrong turn. It did so consciously and deliberately. All it has done since then is to travel farther down this road to where turning back is not an option. Each step isolates it further from the masses; each sordid development entrenches it as an object of derision in the minds of the people.
Today, the PPP, its progeny, and beneficiaries stand as testimonials for two of the social sins inscribed on Gandhi’s tomb: that of “politics without principle” and “wealth without work.” Interestingly, when this was first raised in the late 90s, it provoked profane outrage from diehards; however, in the years since, these same diehards now acknowledge the accuracy of what was claimed – albeit privately and remorsefully. Furthermore, they acknowledge that the mounting atrocities have set the country back significantly; and that race relations have been harmed, perhaps irreparably.
Additionally, many regard 1992 as the year when the nation lost the last vestiges of its innocence, when a hoped for transcendence of spirit and vision was darkened by the pillage of the crooked and the foul. Cromwell spoke of them: “Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice that you do not possess? …ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation.”
Guyana has grown odious since 1992 when men of accumulated learning subsume ethics and morals to the unthinkable; when there is acclamation for the fine arts of dissembling, incapacity of character, and rapacious ambitions; when ordinary men and women of ordinary outlook – and sometimes extraordinary prescience – are hounded for searching to recapture the essence of the lost soul of a nation.
In the twilight of noontime, too many citizens stare unseeingly, unfathomably at fears unrecognized, and hungers unanswered. Each day a sliver of the soul crumbles and fades. Those at the top celebrate the distance traversed from the shadow of the guillotine; those at the bottom hear the foreboding of distant thunder. So the people of a nation no longer live a life; they serve a life sentence through a waking unyielding nightmare.
