So, the role of government is to set the national tone which makes its quotient of decency directly proportional to what it promotes from its agencies.
In Guyana, that office is uniquely significant.
Being a unicameral body …most votes rule… determining the order of the day is the domain of the leading Party because of the number of seats it holds, and with the extra one annexed from a party that it carved out to strategically ensure that one seat buffer.
It was the absence of this buffer that became the official cause of death of the last government, accelerated by other political comorbidities, like the lack of any coherent agenda other than that of wanting to be President and in power…is the thinking.
And less understood is the extent of the PPP collaboration with resident diplomats, election observers, the ‘open chain letter’ gang within Guyana’s borders, its intersection with the US supported agencies like OAS and the calculated interference from US State Department’s Pompeo, himself.
That machination was hardly the random good will of America and its beholden minions and should be filed under their soft take over project, ‘Nation Building’, promulgated by Ronald Reagan and refined for purpose since then, through rescue entities like USAID.
At its most basic, the previous government lost the election because of the obvious absence of functional administrative structure which made it easy for a change of government to be effectuated with a premier assist from the US ambassador, in her to call on the President to concede, in a duplicitous litany of why she champions democracy.
Now her boys are back – eroding every boundary between democracy and dictatorship.
Madam Ambassador, who had shown diplomatic dexterity in citing Article 21 of the Human rights declaration of 1948 as it pertains to elections, is now less enthusiastic about articulating United Nations Centre for Human Rights Policing Laws pertaining to use of force and nondiscrimination by police, born of the same 1948 seed.
It’s long been thought that the ballot box may have been listed as the immediate cause of APNU’s political death but being painfully aware of its adjacent flaws, we knew that a political autopsy report would reveal more…pardon the morbidity… but it’s part of the service.
Like counterinsurgency warfare, turns out that the goal wasn’t necessarily to help win the General Elections of 2015 by ballot but to bring back the boys in a self-serving appropriation of the term Democracy…with Lynch, in pious posture, using the ‘atrocity’ of daring to contest a ‘free and fair’ election result to justify the support of a band of brigands her State Department’s diplomatic lenses exposed to us.
It had to be ‘free and fair’… after all, they were monitoring it all along … but read on.
Quick recap shows– she arrived in Guyana on or around in March 9 2019, March 13th she presented her Credentials to President Granger who accepted them on behalf of us all AFTER she was emailed on April 10th 2019 by Mercury LLC, on behalf of Jagdeo and his Party about his inveigled No Confidence Motion… for perspective.
We may remember that we only learned of a program called LEAD -‘Leadership and Democracy’- being run by the International Republican Institute, IRI, in Guyana …during a very public break up with the Ramotar iteration of PPP rule and its agent, Glenn Bradbury, of very colorful repute…IRI being one of several umbrella organizations disguising America’s CIA.
Bradbury’s ambition of jockeying to be the agent who secured America’s foothold in the region may have been raw enough for Ramotar to use it as leverage, ultimately kicking him and his IRI Leadership Democracy program out by revoking work permit and visa, when things soured. But we were counting the seconds to when Jagdeo would have ordered his return …with that USD 1.2 million waiting to be spent on a project that would have been recorded as necessary expenditure on the US ledger and on no traceable financial record elsewhere.
And though the PPP reestablished relations with them 8 months later, after publicly shaming them, the IRI, we’re thinking, thought a lesson on how not to bite the hand that feeds should be taught…through an alignment with the other guys and a 2015 ‘vote like a boss campaign’ to let them know the mission could be accomplished through other channels…now with opportunity to play both ends against the middle, giving one quick victory and the other a promise of extended victory with support from its overtly partial diplomatic envoy.
Remember, their mission is regional occupation…which makes Guyanese collateral damage but with the caveat of the PPP getting to decide which demographic of the population gets more damage than not.
The mission was important enough for the democracy salesmen to return to the undemocratic element- the Party with the solid record of governing malfeasance which necessitated its rebranding as ‘Champions of Democracy’ -democracy being part of the help America generously doles out through its USAID, as a disguised gratuity that ultimately benefits the giver more than the ‘benefactor’.
And America is all in, chaperoning politicians their State Department has documented as anti-democratic, presenting them to the US Congress and the Congressional Black Caucus ,with distracting falsehoods and fallacies to make it difficult to trace the facts of PPP governing atrocities.
We don’t know… we’re not in the business of political psychoanalysis. We just try to connect the dots… as we see it…especially when they pick up from where they left off.
What we do know is that national instability is fallow ground for leaders of world bodies claiming human rights bona fides and when there is geographic proximity to a target like, say, Venezuela, it’s not unusual to see some sort of leveraging of politicians filed under ‘Noriega’, whose Natural Resource Fund of about USD 1bn sits in the Federal Bank of NY subject to release, only if America finds the government to be valid.
And the tag team of America’s self-confessed coup plotter and agitator Rubio pushing to remove Maduro ,with Madam Plenipotentiary possibly knowing (April 10th) of a no confidence plot well before it occurred, is the kind of re-moralizing and repurposing of the Democracy blueprint that has been used before by Madam’s leaders.
But getting back to national tone, which is more than just a President standing at a podium calling for calm, after endemic racial attacks or police brutality by operational procedure.
Laws and their enforcement could only do so much to perpetuate the Republic. People would have to invoke the unwritten norms of civic virtue and would be more inspired if they were modeled by leadership.
Standards are easier to destroy than to establish, is the saying and is demonstrated deftly in politics and in Guyana, under the current crop of recycled leaders which comes with a president who is rehearsed to imperfection.
This is a President who doesn’t so much greet his opponents as harass them with his weaponized extended arm, to publicly claim civility as camouflage for, amongst other atrocities, the number of police deaths of Afro Guyanese men that have occurred under his short tenure.
Adding to that is a leading Party that is more ideologically distinct than nationally driven, which makes a whole- of- country approach by its government a pale imitation of leadership.
Detaining officials of the previous government and siccing police outriders on current government officials, is what this US ambassador should characterize as ‘banana Republic stuff’, since her country’s democracy is founded on the peaceful transfer of power, which translates to not using the forces of government to intimidate, coral or murder citizens to enforce its way.
Where past Ambassadors appeared to merely steer the PPP towards democracy, this Ambassador, of plenipotentiary power, has deployed the full vial of venom into Guyana’s political stream- having been assigned during the tenure of her last President, whose mission to infect democracy by aligning with the malleable criminal element, resembles much of what she and her IRI have accomplished with the PPP, so far, is the thinking.
There was a time when there was hope that actual possession of the presidency and the privilege of its responsibility would have shifted the practice of governing by political division more to the side of patriotism, which would cater to the entire country and every single demographic.
Not so, now.
The promoters of the current PPP are of the ilk of the plenipotentiary Madam and her agency, IRI, who have switched from the time-release dispensing of democracy, to mainlining their version into our society, using politicians who have been battle tested for corruption, cameo civil service assignments , ultra partisanship and tenuous regard for patriotism, all per their State Department findings.
We couldn’t impress the point more.
And with Presidents like Ali- uniquely unqualified for reasons not limited to fraud of several stripes –we couldn’t expect a tone reset from him which wouldn’t be a reading recitation of Jagdeo’s concoction.
It may be easier to say…well so much for tone …having established the miniscule quotient of political decency shared amongst the rulers in the leading Party of Guyana.
But the fate of Guyanese and the right to the democracy of their republic should not be the decision of two bad actors with a spotty commitment to democracy – America’s Madam and a Vice President whose appointment is tantamount to a third term in office as president … considering the speculation on his honesty and desire for real overhaul by Madam’s State Department.
The Opposition, as the other arm of government is still devoid of imperative administrative structure and is still flatfooted when unqualified hustlers and political party tourists seeking to head GuySuCo audition and succeed after some public adulation of the politician with the most comprehensive record of malfeasance in government.
Look.
Some things are very clear.
Foreign infiltration into our domestic politics is real and is evidenced by the monopoly of public space that has been imposed as foreign policy and by the foreigners themselves. US aid and US imperialism are interchangeable and is intertwined with diplomatic presence and commitment to seize geopolitical placement while protecting its stake in Guyana’s extractive industries. Madam’s rogues have been dressed in suits and prepped to sit at Congressional tables.
We’d be hallucinating if we thought this fight could be won by the Opposition’s single – issue contentions on non mainstream media and from an unstructured platform of freestyle talking points. It’s a fight they’ve barely acknowledged and are ill prepared to engage.
We’re in the final rounds and are way behind.
Losing is not a survivable option and that’s the tone the Opposition must set…and now.
That’s why they’re there.
