At the dawn of the New Year, most of us will have come through the past couple of weeks of religious observance, companionship and revelry, with great hopes for ourselves, our families and even our troubled country. Perhaps it is a reflection of the goodwill generated by the Christmas season and the general joy with which the vast majority of Guyanese celebrate the holidays; perhaps it is a simple manifestation of our common humanity and the optimism that keeps us going against all the evidence and all the odds.
We Guyanese – at least those of us still here, hanging on to this under-populated, under-developed and politically immature nation – are nothing if not optimists. We have to be. Otherwise, we would find ourselves wallowing in a Slough of Despond and most of us would have emigrated with our relatives and friends to seek greener pastures. No doubt, more will decamp this year, but there are clearly many who still believe in the bounty of this land and the mythical promise of our Guyana, El Dorado.
The great Englishman of letters, Samuel Johnson, is said to have described second marriage as “The triumph of hope over experience.” In several respects, much the same could be said of any optimism breaking out with the New Year. But with 2014 barely three days old, we fear that we may have nothing more than cold water to pour over whatever hopefulness lingers past the New Year hangover.
We recall that a little over two years ago, in the face of the political uncertainty surrounding the new parliamentary dispensation and in the full glow of Christmas cheer, we had floated the suggestion of the President hosting a dinner for the country’s parliamentarians, regional councillors and leading politicians, so that they could break bread together and celebrate their commonality, with a view to forging a new beginning (‘Companionship and commensality,’ December 23, 2011). That was, obviously, in light of the prevailing poisoned political atmosphere, hopelessly naïve and idealistic.
We recall also that, a week later, we had posited that citizen pressure and the force of public opinion could serve to reinforce the message of the November 2011 elections, that it could not be business as usual and that the politicians were obliged to negotiate a new course based on fresh thinking and improved governance (‘New Year dreams,’ December 30, 2011).
As a practical step, we had called for the holding of local government elections, “to buttress our democratic evolution and to build citizen participation in the political process from the bottom up rather than seek to maintain the top-down system that perpetuates patronage and tribalism.” And in wishing for a reinvigorated civil society with the full and active participation of the youth, we had also opined that “[c]ritical to making our democracy truly functional will be the opening up of channels for the people to make their voices heard and the creation of mechanisms for engagement with the politicians at both the local government and national levels, outside of party structures.”
Much of this, of course, anticipated the objectives of the USAID-funded Leadership and Democracy (LEAD) project. But, as we all know, the government has rejected this project and, with it, any pretext of building a genuinely modern, inclusionary, democratic state.
Indeed, very little of the change we hoped for two years ago has happened. If anything, the political situation has deteriorated to such an extent that our individual and collective security is arguably threatened more than at any other time in our post-Independence existence. Official obfuscation, the blame game and political gridlock are the order of the day and it is difficult to envisage how the different parties will “work together,” as the President seems to wish.
Experience would suggest that the situation is hopeless. But even as we contemplate the failures of the past and the challenges before us, we know that we all – the President, cabinet, opposition and citizenry – have, somehow or the other, to find the way for hope to triumph.
