Dear Editor,
I look around and listen. There is no one, no sound. Guyana is a lonely place. A democratic wilderness, with so-called Guardians of Democracy, elections petitioners, Arthur Chung Conventioneers, and GECOM and Ashmin’s protesters now all conspicuously absent, and silent as tombs. What happened to all of them?
Last year, they could not be kept away, or be quiet. That was a good thing. For many long months, the rafters shook with the vibrant: ‘free and fair’ and ‘democratic process.’ It doesn’t get any better than those. Guyanese – the rank and file, rank partisans and bigots, academics of some rank, and people just rank from other things – all piled into tight spaces and bellowed themselves hoarse, after whipping themselves into tumultuous frenzies. They peeled back every layer of the onion, took out the seeds of blazing jalapeno peppers with their bare hands, and weathered every storm to get to the bottom of truth and speak it. Loudly. They wouldn’t take any of the party’s, any of the leader’s SoPs, without dispute, the closest piercing scrutiny, the quickest dismissal. Where are they now?
What happen to these idealists and visionaries today, when there are so many abominations going on in the government? The secrecies that conceal skullduggeries (just like in the elections). What are they so quiet, so blindly and dumbly accepting, with anything that is shoveled down their craw, and that they swallow wholesale and regurgitate, as willing participants in a national deceptive propaganda scheme? Why have Guardians of Democracy and other elections petitioners lost their vigilance and have neither interest nor energy-indeed, the care-to go beyond the numbers? To probe below the surface, than accept everything at face value? They fought for free and fair, but are now fearful of losing out on prized relationships, and the personal rewards that they glean. It should be obvious that nobody gave a damn about democracy, but only of becoming part of the corrupt plutocracy promised by whichever side emerged victorious.
Men and women who waxed loudly about nobility and altruism are now noticeable for the bargains that they made, which feather their beds. They were performing on the national elections stage, while craftily managing self-enriching sleeper roles; now they sleep well, thanks to PPP occupational and financial narcotics. All legal, of course; and all part of the same sleazy local political game, of course.
Thus, all the new political parties have blended comfortably into the PPP framework. It is a tangled web of deception, which started before March 2, 2020, now blooms prettily. The new political groups have demonstrated that they are as craven and grasping as the old PPP/C and PNC. Nothing is new under the sun in Guyanese politics. Today, the effusive have become defensive; the self-proclaimed truthful mutated into a bellyful of the dreadful and shameful. They have no voice, take no position. Not on corruption or discrimination or governance criminalization. Speechless, clueless, and gutless are their new free and fair and democratic ideals and pursuits.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
