I have said before that it is impossible to find sufficient thanks to heap upon the coalition parties for winning the 2015 elections and preventing Guyana going down the tragic path of ethnic domination orchestrated by the PPP/C. I have argued repeatedly in this column that there are only two ways out of Guyana’s ethnic dilemma: the inhuman one the PPP/C set itself and the consensual democratic one, and the fact that the PPP/C failed should have been a signal lesson for the current regime. However, the government has now completed four years in office and notwithstanding its rhetoric about the need for social cohesion, a substantial number of Guyanese believe that it is now set upon a path not unlike that of its predecessor, and are prepared to resist this as best they can. No government can sensibly manage such a divided country, and attempts to do so led the PPP/C into many dark alleys, some of which the APNU+AFC government has already entered.
Like the PPP/C the tone of this government suggests that it is in deep denial. ‘Over these past four years, the policies and programmes of the Coalition Government have favorably impacted every aspect of life in Guyana, from the coastland to the hinterland, and in our riverain and indigenous communities. No government before has done more within such a short span of time.’ It is the last sentence that concerns me. I believe that taking context and the statistics easily available to me into consideration, an assessment of a few of the important and verifiable elements of this statement will prove that it is no more than a Goebbelsian boast.
