It’s April 2nd 2020 and the clocks are striking 13 …
a play on George Orwell’s opening line in his dystopian novel 1984….which ain’t so dystopian no mo…it’s predicate being credibility and government manipulation duping malleable minds into misplaced fealty.
The political landscape in Guyana is of oversimplified geography ….an ethnic chasm, two primary tribes and in varying locations behind them, smaller tribes ready to migrate to where they perceive the political weather to be warmer.
The 2015 ouster of the 23 year dictatorship had short joy largely because the new Administration squandered its thin popularity in its first half year and mostly because the booted Administration maintained functional ill-will enabled by the insufficient decency of its Party’s leader.
The calls for engineered election since 2018 have now been answered with a definitive date – and within the Constitutionally allotted time frame to the ire of those whose machinations failed to secure an earlier date – summarily placing the marchers and organizers of dissent on the unemployment line.
So, with nothing more to do than attack the fact that the Elections they plotted didn’t occur within their conspired time frame, they are decrying the declaration of General Elections by the lawful Government’s interpretation of the Constitution in one of the biggest slap-downs of an Opposition that ever attempted to weaponize a nation’s Constitution to steal the reins of government.
Hence the the frenzy and we’re watching them malfunction almost comically as their clock strikes 13…praising the same Jagdeo that they demonstrated against.
Loyalty to Constitution principles, they pretended but now find reason to get behind the very Party that they lambasted for disemboweling said Constitution, keeping the country in the basement of existence, saying that the 4 year tenure of the Coalition should have shown more improvement- as if 4 years could unbury the political dead though, we’ll confess, we’re hardly surprised.
Disrupting for the sake of disruption is a great attention grabber …confirmed when the maverick disrupter eats his own cause….
I’ll mention Henry Jeffery only because his statement “Guyana’s uniqueness leads to multiple absurdities” places him as one such absurdity…political oddity even.
Commentary on that other Progressive who has gone home to the PPP because there’s “real change” over there files under prophecy fulfilling.
Like most countries, Guyana’s traditional Parties have voter monopoly by virtue of name recognition…which tends to dredge up their pathologies, as burdensome as they are.
Then we look at their overleaping made-for-campaign manifestos, if they’re not rolling documents of the Jagdeo kind that promise everything with clear intent of accomplishing absolutely nothing – and we say this looking at the PPP’s consecutive decades of government that convulsed into socio economic failure and national demoralization…
Fair to say there’s a plague on both Parties but who’s more infected, we ponder, for vote we must. People died for the right to vote.
We have an obligation to honor the dead.
But, if the PPP power grabbing tactics of the past twelve months were any barometer for the future, one would question the “real change” that it supposedly represents.
With an ideology founded for its Indo base, Party leadership is moving gallantly into the future on some weird ethno nationalism that embodies the Party Paramountcy that was the demon of the past.
With no genuine or practical national plan, Leadership focuses on mobilizing resentment, harvesting votes from people with negative aims through the promulgation of the default stance of racism that was evident in the manufactured Coalition/Haitian nexus, complete with stock photos.
And when a Party is based on resentment, it starts casting around for things like cheap inclusivity, like hiring low-moral Afro supporters to bear placards and herald the good of a PPP under Jagdeo, all of which is demonstrably false.
The political imperative is no longer about policy any more, the optimism, the dynamism, the muscular can do for the nation approach all abandoned.
It’s about traipsing to the courts and making a spectacle of one’s political self;
suggesting that government is for one people only;
that national values be damned in running a Presidential candidate who’s under indictment for government fraud because the timid electorate can be insulted this way.
The optimism many had – and this goes for both Parties – has long since evaporated like mist on a malarial swamp. There’s a collective oozing of disappointment from Guyanese praying for a better day even if they’ve pledged allegiance to a tribe. National pathology reads political fatigue.
We understand because this Opposition, that has fashioned loutishness as a campaign tool, is anticipating fatigue to be so insurmountable that voters, beyond its vigorously obedient base, would still see them as electable after their insurrection to force General Elections, which they just have to wait on anyay.
And during this period of pre-election reflection, when they are trying to excuse the squalor that was their regime by doing Constitution battle and GECOM dissecting as a distraction, pretending at this pre -election hour to support oil cash payouts after bashing it in many of their publications, the electorate would be wise to to take a long exhale and consider the options and the role their vote could play in improving Nation and not Party, Population not Tribe.
For what it’s worth, we’ve seen the two traditional Parties for 53 years and though it’s exciting to see a few others contending, they represent parts of the political sum so it would be pre-emptive and prudent to consider whom they would caucus with, should they secure Parliamentary seats.
Notwithstanding, the exhaustion that is significant sentiment now should never prevent one from casting a vote.
That would be the political equivalent of cutting off your right leg to lose weight.
If the nation wants a Government through a Party that is the only one in the nation’s history to be rebuked by the United Nations for its racism, they can vote for the PPP.
If the Nation wants to be led by a Government through a Party that is the only one in the country’s history to be sanctioned by a court of law in 1997 for rigging elections and sullying national history through a foisted President who was deemed illegal by Justice Desiree Bernard; then, in 2001 when Bharrat stole 45000 votes which Justice Claudette Singh sanctioned as rigging and forced him to return the due amount to the United Force giving them a Seat in Parliament, then they can vote for the PPP.
If the nation wants to be led by Government through a Party that leased national patrimony in wanton fashion, that gave them NICIL, Winston Brassington, Ahsni and Gitanjali Singh whose 800, 000 USD still sit in the Fiji Islands, then they can vote for the PPP.
From what we’re learning, voters want to know these things, the granular details of Presidential politics and want their Party to campaign on facts and not just the tribal recitations.
Like them, we’re waiting for the Coalition to expand the electorate, extend its franchise with sharp, snappy, sloganeering and crisp fact -filled messaging.
The best antidote for a bad candidate is a better candidate, one that is not filed in the ‘U’ Section of the United Nations’ list of country -contacts red pages, under Unsavory.
If the near future resembles the previous past, the election the country needs in about 140 days should reject the nation’s 23 year old mistake and inflict instructive carnage on this group that dares to run a felon -in -waiting as a Presidential candidate, in glaring disrespect for the voters.
To scrub the remaining Presidential stain from the office, tarnished by 23 years of being run as a criminal enterprise under Jagdeo and his Opposition, the incumbent Coalition must highlight its contrastingly serious candidacy which, in spite of a short and interrupted tenure, has strengthened institutional muscles that atrophied under the PPP when the country registered consistently on the warning and alert lists for risk of State failure
The nation’s politics remains factionalized and ideologically splintered .
The Opposition Leader and his Presidential Candidate are both damaged contenders grossly unqualified for the job…verifiably so.
Embarking upon a vigorous and sustained campaign against these two can’t be that hard.
