Dear Editor,
Forty-six years of independence celebrated. Who is really free in this Magnificent Province? And free to do what?
They will tell you it was freedom for all of us from the yoke of the white man’s burden. Oh, but they will say precious little of the liberty of knavery that immediately followed; it was debilitating and despairing for twenty-eight dark years. Nowadays nothing – absolutely nothing – is said of the unfettered avarice of the last two decades; it is universal, oppressive. The 28-year knavery of the then Masters of the Guyanese Universe was arithmetic; that of the last twenty years exponential. There is no comparison; the first was a constrictor, the current one a constrictor and a cobra under the same hood. They have had the freedom to shed old skins, wear new ones, poison, squeeze, and suffocate. They have grown fat in the belly and fatter in the bankbook. Their coils extend… Their nests cushioned in the sinews and spirit of a nation exiled in its own heritage.
Citizens have had the freedom to shrink through silence, through withdrawal, through flight. There is the freedom to extract the deprivation of choice from the residual dregs of a barren, rocky existence. There is the freedom to applaud housing apartheid (Pradoville); to bow down before the national religion of greed and corruption. It is one of the fundamentalist variety: serious, dedicated, absolute.
The conscientious and fair-minded are free to observe the unshackled truths of the times: the farce of investigations designed to cover up rather than clean up. They behold a sitting president who sanitizes himself through distance and the impeachment of studied muteness. There is the freedom against exposure, the right to shield the iniquities of brothers – political and blood – from the travails of authentic scrutiny. This is the price and profile of forty-six years of freedom.
See the men waving the flags of deception, as they contort to the pangs of the national addiction known as greed and corruption. These three words could replace those on the Coat-of-Arms. They tell the story of what this nation has become, and its national character. This is what freedom had produced, where all roads lead.
I hate myself for just writing about them; I feel tainted. This is how revolting I find what happens, and those who engineer the obscenities that grace our days of freedom.
Again I ask: freedom for whom? And freedom to do what? The answers have never been more obvious.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
