Who could have believed, even last year at this time when the government had already embarked on its elections’ delay strategy, that we would be facing an Easter such as this? The opposition it is true would not have been surprised by the ruling party’s scheme to steal the election, but neither they nor anyone else could have predicted the current pandemic which assails us. For a population to be afflicted by two major crises at the same time seems beyond excessive. The problem is that to get anything approaching a national response to the health crisis, the political one needs to be dealt with as soon as possible, so a regular, internationally recognised government can take over the controls. Only then, one suspects, will the international community respond to this country’s requests for assistance with anything like alacrity.
But no, everyone in the caretaker government from the President down, not to mention some of the leading actors in Gecom, have no intention of relieving the Guyanese people of some of the stress they are currently under. Even if the President, so seemingly addicted to power, is not prepared to read the riot act to his own party, Gecom is still the one in the best position to get us out of this stranglehold. But here we have a Gecom Chair who is prepared to sacrifice any reputation she acquired in her years on the bench in order to go down in history bracketed along with the infamous Harold Bollers. What she has done, or rather not done, in the course of this post-election period is all she will be remembered for, although she still has time to redeem herself.
Then we have the three government-appointed commissioners led by Mr Vincent Alexander, who have been using a plethora of legalisms plus other strategems to ensure that progress is not made. We must not forget Gecom’s CEO, Mr Keith Lowenfield, who at the very least is seriously arithmetically challenged and in addition to that has had no qualms about participating in a process which is widely acknowledged to lack integrity. Of course we cannot exclude the star of this farce, Mr Clairmont Mingo, assisted by Ms Roxanne Myers, whose actions are so outrageous they belong more properly in a stage comedy routine.
There is too Gecom’s Secretariat as a whole, which issued a statement critical of opposition commissioners who had raised questions about Mr Lowenfield’s claim that 156 days would be required for a recount. In the first place, the impropriety of this does not appear to have dawned on the members, never mind that it is the job of commissioners to offer criticisms of proposed courses of action where appropriate, and in the second, they are in no position to deem them unethical as they did in this instance.
While all of these players along with President Granger and his caretaker government proceed along their blinkered path, the coronavirus continues to spread, oblivious to the shortcomings of our political world. If there is one thing the British have always been good at in contrast, it is coming together in times of crisis, and this pandemic is no exception.
In addition, their government keeps people informed with daily press conferences, and prior to being admitted to hospital with Covid-19, even Prime Minister Boris Johnson, although ill, was communicating via video link with the public. It can only be commented that while British citizens, both supporters and opposition will have paid attention to what Mr Johnson had to say, and especially to his exhortations to observe the lockdown and social distancing rules, President Granger will not enjoy the benefit of such respect because he has little credibility at a national level. That is not good news when combating a virus.
It might be added that Minister of Public Health Volda Lawrence inspires no confidence, lacking as she does, both energy and administrative capacity. The shortcomings of the system which she has had put in place were put on painful public display following the death of Mr Deryck Jaisingh who only got help 11 days after calling the Covid-19 hotline. And while this might perhaps be the worst example, there were other complaints before that, yet nothing was done to rectify the deficiencies of the system. This is not the way to confront the spread of a virus which is so notoriously infectious.
One can only hope that the government is not hoping to use the epidemic to extend its unprincipled life even further; if it is, it would be putting its own short-term interests above the health and safety of its people. As other countries which have infinitely more resources at their disposal than Guyana have found out to their cost, the coronavirus is no respecter of class, status, wealth, politics or race. It has not spared the UK’s Mr Johnson, for example, neither several members of his government and his Chief Medical advisor.
As an aside it might be mentioned that the coronavirus is the second major pandemic in modern times. The first was the Spanish ͗flu (an unfortunate misnomer) at the end of the First World War, that raged from 1918 to roughly 1920 or a little later. Of Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George, America’s President Woodrow Wilson, France’s President Georges Clemenceau and Italy’s Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando who met at Versailles in 1919 to settle the terms of peace, the first three had all suffered from Spanish ͗flu.
Exactly how many people died from Spanish ͗flu in this country is not known and will probably never be known, but it is thought to have killed anything up to 100 million people worldwide. However, it has been suggested by a London-based historian that its last flare-up could have been in Guyana when a virulent infection wiped out the nation of the Tarumas. A few members did survive to be absorbed by the Wapishanas, but as an identifiable nation the Tarumas ceased to exist. Even today the Wai-Wais refer to the Kassikaityu where the extinct Indigenous nation once lived as the ‘River of the Dead’.
A great deal more is known nowadays about the transmission of disease than was known in 1918, when they had no understanding of viruses. However, some of their strictures would have been familiar to us, such as isolation and social distancing. Nowadays it is lockdowns and social distancing, both of which will be hard for many people in Guyana to comply with. How seriously some citizens will take the requirements will depend either on how much they know about the coronavirus, or how seriously they take the government which has instituted the measures.
We should not allow the political games being played by the coalition and segments of Gecom to degrade our capacity to deal with Covid-19. We want all our energies directed at trying to eliminate this virus as soon as possible; we do not want to be numbered among those countries where it lingers for longer than anywhere else, or where it recrudesces.
