Dear Editor,
Guyanese drove themselves to rapturous heights over the ordinary metamorphosed into the extraordinary, the grandeur, of visa-free travel to the land of their former colonizers and imperial masters. How quickly we forget! How self-enslaving we can be! We have more oil per breathing body than any place on earth, and we are drooling over a visa-free travel announcement? Is this what the fruits of free and fair elections have come to mean? That we run to anywhere? Surely, we have lost whatever marbles we had left, that is, if we ever had any to begin with, given how people have reacted, how things shaped up since that announcement.
I am aware that Esau sold his treasure for a pot of soup, and Africans sold their brothers for a few trinkets and baubles, and there were some subcontinent Indians who loved their exploiters more than their own. But here we are thrilled to death by what can be nothing but giving up another piece of our prized possessions for the swindle and siren call of visa-free travel to the UK. A place from which so much originated that condemned the forbears of some of us to chained servitude, and those of my own to palpable serfdom. Editor, when I heard of the reactions of my fellow Guyanese, I concluded that we are so far gone now that we have nowhere left to go.
We have all this oil, and it is still any port for a storm, even if it is only for a part of a year. This is not just the rankest of abominable inferiority complexes, or the worst of clever foreign indoctrination (manipulation), it is of people who are bereft of pride. The whole world is beating a path to our door, and here are Guyanese, not being able to get away from this place quick enough. I think I am beginning to understand why this fabulous oil, this business about clean governance, and this desire for ethical leadership evidence such stoic indifference. None of those ever really mattered, not even the rich oil crown.
Give us visa-free travel, and it is off to Heathrow and Gatwick. Enoch Powell must be doing a slow tortured turn in his restless grave. The English had so many prejudices to aim at their own fellow Europeans, they couldn’t wait to get out of the EU. And they could not get far enough from Dishy Rishi Sunak. And mindless Guyanese are overflowing with joy to rub shoulders with people who have no use for them, other than how they can use them. Move over Exxon, here comes Tullow. It is the second British Invasion, this time with oil blocks in mind. Richard III lost his head; Guyanese now have nothing left to lose, not even a little self-respect.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
