Dear Editor,
This promises to be the most pivotal year in the short troubled history of Guyana. There is the compelling probability that it will be neither decisive nor uplifting, but one fraught with more of both the disputatious and the controversial.
Retention of power, the quest for power, and power for the sake of power are the singular objectives. Something has to give, but no one has signalled any interest in relinquishing anything. No, not a smidgen of anything! So it is down to the wire; it is barbed and coated with all the hoary rancour and lethal toxins that have plagued from long ago. There is just too much suppressed anger, too many perforating memories, and too much accumulated resentment for things to be otherwise.
Remember: the pivotal nature of a nation caught at a jagged purgatory of its own making and continued nurturing. In the words of Virgil Facilis descensus averni (the descent into hell is easy).
For certainty, leaders-cum-vocalists will be in full cry, except that most are not listening anymore. The surface may heave, shift, even erupt in a churning maelstrom of energy and sound, but at the core the unruly underlying national essence remains unmoved and unimpressed, as well as unmanaged and unsatisfied. Think one word: race; add two more –blind loyalty; last attach three more: power and money. Thus the national stage is ripe for the renewed public clash of ethnic fundamentalism involving two racial supremacy groups colour-coded PPP and PNC; scrutinize both keenly, and the harsh unsparing verdict is that they are the equivalent of two hate groups, and only one can be ascendant at a time.
Already I have glimpsed the first glimmers of a readiness to get down for a showdown with the possibility of a meltdown in the offering. The people are laden with burgeoning impatience; those with nothing, seeking something, no longer content with just anything, and detesting those who hog everything. There is a vast weariness with equity for sale, and tokenism for hire.
I repeat: 2015 will be a pivotal year. Ebola spared us in 2014, but 2015 is the year of reckoning, in ways other than the literal. It is my belief that pending elections will settle nothing in a definitive manner, and cast the nation back to the status quo ante December 2014. As written before, I believe also that any elections will be real nasty and downright ugly; utterly brutish if all caution is abandoned to the whims of the wind. This could very well be, since the stakes are so high: five more years of this excrescence? Hell, no! By and large, this society lacks interest in more PPP rule; no more of the unspeakable, the impeachable, the ethical grotesqueries, the intellectual graveyard. No more! It is as final as that.
To sensible observers, there is this rich thick mother lode of simmering sullenness in significant segments, along with the pulsing veins that race in anticipation of agitation. When all along there ought to have been the soaring vocabulary of harmony, there is only a singular hypocrisy paying passing homage to unity; when there should have been an expansive programme of inclusion and tolerance and implementing it, there is nothing but the spillage of empty rhetorical pollution. Talk it, mean it, do it, then live it. I sense, however, lateness in the day; events, as well as the locked thinking behind them, are in motion. A different hour is promised; it could be anything but tranquil. Time will tell.
I began here in Guyana as an optimist, before long I became a fatalist, and now I am almost an atheist. The gods do test us, and this nation is in for the toughest, most demanding one ever. It was Livy who said, “We are unable to manage either our maladies or the remedies.” We shall see.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall