Dear Editor,
I return from my now annual self-imposed 40-day retreat in the wilderness to this public service commitment of mine, and there is this unending sameness of the way things are in daily Guyanese life. I look around and I hear the noise. Vaccination. Education. Vaccination again. Then the health system this time. Labour is compelled into the raucous stews. This makes me appreciate still more my now yearly 40-day sojourn away from Guyana. There is vehement delight in working, not towards goals that which improves the texture of individual life, thereby contributing some small thread to the national tapestry into a glorious and envied sight, but this unfathomable relish in being about those internal elements that flush the sewage of ourselves right into our sorry faces. Take a cursory analysis of leadership and governance, and there is the cinemascope production of rottenness at the individual and across the board leadership levels; leaders struggle to conceal the head-to-toe decay in them, and they fail. This includes the head of this, and the next one in line, all the way down the line. In something as basic as learning and schools, as alarming as a viral pandemic and vaccines, all roads ultimately lead to the court system. Welcome to the standing arbitration norm. This is the wisdom of the only mediation that we will accept. Examine in passing only, and the only conversations we have are through intermediaries: the judicial system, the weight of international influence. This is the quality of the national conversation that we thrill to on everything. This we love, we call democracy and nationhood and governance and responsible citizenship.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
