Dear Editor,
There is this cruel mockery that assails the senses almost daily. It is where political leaders garb themselves in red and pretend to bleed with and for their people. In this instance, it is anguished sugar workers. The loudly hypocritical men who practise this studied deception, at which they are very good, should only be scorned and exposed for their professional mourning, their unpersuasive tears, and their ugly exploitation of the weak, the weary and worried.
In their time, these same leaders poured money. The question is to where did some of it go other than to secret crookedness and the telltale suspicious? In their time, they supposedly managed, but how would any objective reviewer assess such stewardship, other than for being of the opportunistic self-serving variety, and during which the deterioration accelerated? In their time, they claimed sugar workers as their own, but for what purpose? Clearly, it was a one-way loyalty, an unreciprocated interest beyond the politically superficial that demanded an electoral presence through an easily instigated ethnic wedge. That same convenient cultivated one-way loyalty on the part of political leaders continues today.
Today the current government is flayed for its emphasis on the economic, its clinical distance. I ask: where was the care and compassion that is appealed for today from those who were laughing and smirking behind their hands on their cunning during their long reign? They were laughing as they accumulated properties, privileges, and powers. They were smirking as they made fun with the vulnerable who believed in them; they were laughing as they played games with fragile troubled emotions and psyches. And all the while, these newly noble concerned leaders helped themselves at the expense of the same increasingly wretched constituency over which today there is much handwringing and loud lamenting.
Where was the care for the people then? The absence of financial prudence and straightforward leadership, and the presence of incompetence contributed heavily to an incontestable record of failure. How much more do they really care for these same people today? The way I see matters is that it cannot be as other than the passport for returning to the promised land of power and more plunder. True leaders who really care identify closely and honestly with the welfare and prospects of the lowly; they feel their pain; they do not use them, misuse them, and abuse them. Rather, they hurt and cry and are moved by the harsh dismal present and future of those wondering what will become of them.
Genuine leaders do not build fabulous mansions for themselves and surround themselves with all the luxuries of life, while their own scratch for the semblance of a subsistence existence. Real leaders, caring leaders neither live nor operate in this deplorable manner before their claimed own. Truth be told, they would not even behave like this to dogs. But they do so here in Guyana and prosper. They prosper on the fears and misery of others.
Editor, from long ago and far away, I did come to know more than few cane-cutters (as they were called then). I sat with them, drank with them, sang with them. They are mainly simple people. I watched as the barman, the chit-man (lenders), and distraught wives competed for the wages of the preceding week. They are poor people. They are people not just voters. They are families with hopes and visions, and not just electoral fodder. The people they look up to, trust, rely upon have betrayed them for a long time. They betrayed them then; they seek to betray them again with more Skeldons, and more self-rewarding financial abominations.
Tomorrow will bring more speechifying, more hair pulling (even where there is no hair), and more breast-beating to agitate an already restless and dispirited audience long cowed, long held captive to the calculating whims of the perfidious. And when such is over, the even more disturbed listeners will stumble through the heat and rain towards their humble abodes, while their chuckling champions motor off in air-conditioned comfort to their extravagant real estate piles, vault-busting bank balances, and their sumptuous banquets laid out for the feasting. Meanwhile, sugar workers-numbed and disturbed have rice and dhal to comfort them. Some days the latter just might not be there.
This is the record; this is the reckoning; and this is the raw retelling of those who now first wax sharply, and then take umbrage, over the exposure of their nakedness and endless other misdeeds that injured, perhaps irreparably, those they pretend to embrace. If they can do this to their own, then what about the rest?
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall