Dear Editor,
The racialist routine that restricts the Prime Minister from becoming President and preside for the remainder of the government’s term in office on the occurrence of death or resignation of the President; started by the PPP/C and now joined by the PNC-led APNU+AFC Coalition is a retrograde and most repulsive development in the era of unrigged elections in Guyana.
Any practice by political parties to have provisions articulating the ineligibility of the Prime Minister to become the President on an ongoing basis; essentially due to his or her race, is the plainest way of saying that the political party is a racist party and condones racism.
What clingy and perverse character traits allows a man or woman to insult the populace by saying it is okay to deny me the right to hold the office of the Presidency merely because of my race.
Our pundits and media are quiet on this deplorable, despicable and disgracefully racist trend in our Politics and Governance Structure. What difference is this violation of human rights from violations of our Constitution?
It’s Guyana’s partial Jim Crow custom that is insidiously being normalized into our political system, one that is retrogressive, suppressive, oppressive and depressive.
Discrimination on the basis of race is supposed to be illegal for the following: employment, promotion, land allocation, bank loans, access to health, access to education, construction and other contracts, appointment of ambassadors, use of public property, board appointments and such like; yet in Guyana it is okay for Political Parties to enact, entrench and broadcast a racist programme that shackles the Prime Minister.
This sick, miserable and rotten practice must be eliminated by the political parties, it is an act that is offensive to human dignity and human rights.
What does it profit a man to gain a title that drowns his character, disrespects his family, friends and populace and insults his race within and across geographic borders?
Guyanese are being buried deeper into racial divisiveness, disunity and backwardness, led by the PPP/C and the PNC-led APNU+AFC Coalition, with this racial ceiling that prevents the Prime Minister from becoming President as a constant, but only President on a temporary race-changing and musical chairs- type basis.
Let us not strengthen this dreadful gloom that that has been strangling Guyana for far too long. It seems to me that that the reasons educated leaders do not disassociate and disavow this reprehensible development are primarily due to their obsession for status and entitlements, while remaining unbothered not ignorant of the racist poison being promoted and spread in Guyana, with this shackling of the Prime Minister.
Thomas Paine, American political activist and philosopher left us in his debt with these words: “Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”
Yours faithfully,
Nigel Hinds