At the end of an electoral cycle where the occupants of the seat of power change and before the newcomers get down to the business of showing us what they can do, we usually embark on an excursion into political theatre. A prominent feature of those ‘joy rides,’ are ‘disclosures’ that point fingers at those who no longer hold the keys to the vault where the supposed indiscretions of their tenure are locked away. Sooner or later there begins an opening of the Pandora’s Box and a revelation of the ‘discoveries’ found therein
This is a recurring circumstance with which, by now, we ought to be familiar. Beaver-like ‘specialists’ are let loose on mounds of material thought to be fertile with likely long-kept secrets that can be metamorphosed into scandals. The legal people in the incumbent administration wait, poised to put their own imprimatur on every seeming indiscretion.
There is a role here for the media – mostly the state media. They amplify, adding twists of scandal and salaciousness to stories, the primary motive of which often appears to be character assassination rather than righting wrongs. Here, the primary intention is, for fingers to be pointed and for public perceptions of those accused to become ‘poisoned’ by the scale and intensity of the allegations. It is at this juncture that politics can be likened to the proverbial crab dance. Becoming daubed by scandal is an occupational hazard of being ‘in the game.’
And why not? This is politics, after all, and the new incumbents require their breathing space, opportunity to settle in, distraction that allows for the commission of errors that can be bypassed by an audience that is looking the other way. Predecessor character assassination is usually the accusers’ way of giving themselves a chance to cope with the heat that often comes with newness. It evokes different emotions. Supporters of the new incumbent fan the flames and sustain the distraction. The losers’ advocates proffer responses that range from nonchalantly drawing their teeth over the ‘contrived’ charges to erupting into rumbustious comparisons with ‘what went before.’
All of this, however intense and earnest it may seem, are the constituent elements of political theatre, sucked dry of substantive meaning and which, in the final analysis, does no more than add to the angst and aggravation which we could well do without as we try to get on with our lives amidst a seemingly never-ending succession of challenges.
We must be clear on one thing here. Where indiscretions or reasonable suspicions thereof arise in which functionaries placed in positions of trust, gatekeepers, no less, are believed to have betrayed or abused that trust, then these occurrences must be dealt with frontally. There should be no compromise here. The problem is that here in Guyana such occurrences are treated mostly like grist to the political mill, situations that offer more, politically, that is, if they can be wrung dry of scandal and character assassination before, invariably, being eventually tossed aside. The reality is that revelations of this nature are wholly a means to a political end. So that while, for example, it is, unquestionably, an unpardonable indiscretion for functionaries assigned as keepers of state resources to cynically plunder those resources, that is not, all too frequently, the perspective from which the new incumbents see it. The essential truth about politics is that, as a form of human behaviour, it places no limits on cynicism.
But facts are facts. Where this occurs, use of office to unconscionably swindle the state of resources held in trust for the people to whom glowing promises of betterment are made before elections are held must be dealt with frontally though it is no less an indiscretion when those who rule nonchalantly press the indiscretions, real or imagined, into service as means to their own political ends as appears to be pretty much the case in our political culture. In other words the joke is really on us.
The sad reality is that those who rule us at one point in time or another often appear not to administer the law but to be the law. They have arrived at a point where they arrogate to themselves the authority to choose to extract such political currency as they can from matters that have to do with the well-being of the populace, in circumstances where the handling of such matters rest with well-established laws and procedures. Those who wield power often seize the prerogative of unjustified veto. That too is an aberration that we must strive to eliminate.
Here, the incumbents, the accusers, benefit most from a circumstance in which a change of administration is swiftly followed by a changing of the guard as far as control of the state media are concerned. The state media and its partisan helpers can, of course be (as they usually are) pressed into service as helpers on what are, in effect, largely propagandistic political missions.
One is mindful to repeat, of course, that the wanton abuse of state power/state resources by those who are accorded the privilege of holding office must be afforded short shrift by the competent authorities. We cannot go around granting ‘holidays’ to perpetrators of indiscretions that swindle the people of this still impoverished country. On the other hand by pressing such instances – real or contrived, into service for self-serving political ends amounts, arguably, a discretion of a comparable magnitude to the substantive malpractices, where they occur. What the political manipulation does is just what it is intended to do, trigger pre-existing pockets of divided loyalty possessed on a potentially incendiary propensity that ignites prejudices, taking us deeper into the jaws of a divisiveness which, over generations, have refused to go away.
The ruse has worked. It has worked to a point where sufficiently large numbers of us are taken in by what, in political, terms is no more than a three-card trick. What happens to us as a nation is that we, in turn, become driven by blind prejudices that rob us of our rationality so that insofar as good order and moving forward are concerned we often become socially incendiary devices.
If, as a matter of national survival, we must protect the state from plunder by those positioned to serve, then, by the same token we cannot allow that process to metamorphose into periodic scandals and attendant conflict. Sadly, the reality is that what is so often represented as a process designed to hold servants of the state to account have become part of a bigger political theatre that exists to do no more than intervene, periodically to tamper, in an altogether counterproductive manner, with the national political mood.
