How could this nation create a brand new future; one that sees that astonishing, elusive, national potential become real?
At this elections time, leaders emerge on platforms making grandiose promises, seeking power to govern the people.
And these leaders spend an awful amount of time pointing over their shoulders at the country’s past: both the distant and the immediate past.
How could the nation advance forward if leaders keep asking people to look back, and to focus on the historical record?
What relevance does 1973 or 1985 or 1992 or 2007 have with 2011?
History plays a key role in development, of course. To benefit from the lessons we learned from our experiences, we must know our history.
But no one drives a car forward looking into the rear view mirror. To move forward, we must look ahead, following a definite direction. We must have a roadmap of where we want to go as a people.
This country needs a new blueprint for the future. We as a people have got to re-write the future of our homeland.
Looking back, we see degradation, lack of adequate development and depressing failures.
The script the leaders followed for the past 50 years led us in circles.
In 1992, when the governing political party sought to win this country’s first free and fair elections since political Independence, its leaders promised a great future – a new dawn, they said.
Today, 19 years later, we still see no freedom of expression exercised in the state media; public corruption worsens year after year; the capital city stinks with the Mayor and City Council as inept as any in Georgetown’s history; local government elections become more and more a distant dream; organized crime grows in leaps and bounds; migration of skilled people scales alarming levels; and, of crucial importance, democratic institutions suffer serious neglect, abuse and dictatorial mismanagement.
The new dawn has become an old nightmare.
What is so different today than on May 26, 1966?
At least in 1966 people had bright hope. Today, most people express a sense of apathy and hopelessness, having experienced 50 years of failed promises. That’s what the past looks like.
And opposing political leaders love to point to that past in harsh, divisive, strife-ridden rhetoric, delightfully blaming each other for the sad state of affairs.
The blame-game as to who caused the country to be so miserable is becoming quite a cliche. Almost at every political rally, the message follows similar lines: the country is, or was, in a bad state, and the opposing side did it.
The President of this country even invented a new opposition to throw the blame at, lambasting the independent media and labelling reporters “carrion crows and vultures”.
If the government cannot responsibly manage a democracy, where diversity of opinion is the bedrock of a free and fair society, it should blame itself, not the chaotic system of babbling voices.
Rene Girard, the French thinker, propagates a theory that societies bedevilled with social evils resort to scapegoating, finding and blaming a culprit for the ills.
This scapegoating tactic eventually leads to violence. In fact, the very nature of scapegoating is itself an act of violence.
So when political leaders point fingers across the divide to blame others, to make someone or an organization a scapegoat, those leaders seek to perpetuate a verbal violence. And verbal violence could snowball into physical violence. When the media becomes the scapegoat, the society has reached an especial low.
This country has a sad history, a demoralizing past. And it’s easy to jump on the scapegoating horse and flog it senseless.
Pointing one finger accusing the opposing side of the evils, while pointing another finger at a past, a history littered with failed projects and damaging policies and grandiose national programs, only perpetuates the scapegoating phenomenon.
The rhetoric of blame, of scapegoating uploads from the political platforms in villages, through social media, to the entire global village.
The President has not yet made YouTube, Facebook and Twitter into scapegoats.
Anyone who googles the local leaders, and watches videos, reads articles and comments, and listens to audio bites of them talking, would see mostly references to the past, and blame-hurling at each other.
The leaders either talk of the distant past of “28 years”, or the immediate past constituting “the Jagdeo government”.
It’s downright sickening.
What of the future?
The parties launched their manifestos, this high-sounding name for their Action Plans to map the future.
People ignore the manifestos. These documents lack originality, lay flat devoid of vision and provides little intellectual depth.
These manifestos, if we gather them all together from all the parties, should make a great document for mapping the future of our land, for developing our nation, for charting our future as a people. These documents together should be the 2011 roadmap to the future.
Instead, most of the promises, projects, policies and programmes seem so cliche, so worn-out and unimaginative.
Old promises raise their heads, as if to inspire votes, but with no real teeth to their realization.
When this government took office it developed a National Development Strategy, with massive amounts of public comment and promotion of the plan. Nothing has come of it.
What of the future?
Who is developing a blueprint for the future?
This nation must start re-writing its future, or for the next five years we would repeat the past, pretending by much activity to be moving, when in reality we remain in the same spot.
We must re-write our future as a nation, with originality of thinking, visionary leadership and intellectual effort in the development process.
Now is our chance to map the role our country plays in the 21st century global village.
These 2011 election campaigns disappoint because the leadership vacuum in this country stands out so glaring.
It is encouraging to see talk of national unity, reconciliation and forgiveness.
But these dreams would collapse if we cannot draft an original, visionary, intellectually-sound blueprint for how we would advance this nation into a future we could applaud, as a great Guyanese people.
