A democratic polity, in which the law rules supreme, is only possible where there is broad consensus around the conceptual, structural and main processes of the state. Other than that, in one form or another and at different intensities, as Thucydides observed in another context, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Under the PNC and the post Cheddi Jagan PPP/C (the present regime is also not promising) we have had our fill of illiberal government in which law became the servant of those in power and the weak spent their time complaining about dictatorial rule and trying to undermine the state – all to the detriment of the populace, many of whom lost their lives.
Please, give up the usual ethnic blame game and most of all, do not go into the long useless song and dance about the violent nature of Africans and the PNCR, who orchestrated all of this because they wanted to obtain and hold on to power. I am certain that you must have heard of the large number of persons who died in Northern Ireland and other places where a similar ethnic political configuration exists and thousands lost their lives until a sensible political solution was negotiated. It appears to me that the problem is rooted not primarily in the people and their leaders but in the unsuitable assumptions of the political system in which they live. These are alluded to in the following quotation that I will return to in another article.