If there is anything that we, as Guyanese, must seek to learn from the recent quixotic behaviour from a Venezuelan President long in the throes of fending off his own political demons, is that, in our particular circumstances, we need to move with due haste to understanding the true meaning of our national motto, One People, One Nation, One Destiny and to apply that meaning to the process of expunging the various kinds of internal divisions in which we have historically indulged. Whether we care to admit it or not we have embraced forms of behaviour that not only make a mockery of the true essence of our national motto. Those forms of behaviour have greatly reduced our capacity to understand and to apply the true meaning of our national motto and, much worse to threaten to weaken the fabric of our response to Venezuela’s latest ‘noises’ in the matter of its spurious claim to territory that rightfully and unquestionably belongs to Guyana.
What the most recent noise from Caracas does is to reflect the unenviable political position in which President Maduro finds himself and it would be a considerable error to cause him to secure a ‘get out’ position that finds comfort in a Guyana that chooses divisiveness over unwavering collective resolve.
What Mr Maduro’s recent actions do is to challenge us to set aside such differences we live with, and place that condition that we term nationhood ahead of the issues that divide us. If we cannot do that then it is pointless – at times and in circumstances that are convenient to us – to scramble for that very national motto that we so often appear to have set aside. We need to learn (and quickly) that we cannot have it both ways. Our circumstances compel us to either live by the meaning of our national motto or otherwise to stand permanently imperilled by our refusal to do so.
The past week and more has both raised and answered questions about the significance of our national motto. We ought to have learnt, particularly in circumstances such as our own, that our National Motto is not some kind of jingoistic contrivance, some slogan to be trotted out on suitable ceremonial occasions, nor is it something heraldic. In our particular circumstances the significance of our national motto is clear.
What Venezuela’s recent trumpeting on the matter of its envisaged zona en reclamación has done is to remind us that as long as that country’s fanciful idea that it can simply claim and afterwards, run off with two thirds of our country to claim as its own persists, we can afford neither to lose sight of nor to neglect the actual significance of our National Motto. Our leaders, particularly, must govern in a manner that cause us to arrive a point where the significance of the ‘slogan’ is not only pressed into service as part of our various rituals and ceremonies, but must also be fashioned into an ‘ideology’ by which we live. Indeed, the evidence is – in more ways than one – manifest, that we drift from that axiom at our collective peril.
What we have failed, (and the evidence is clear) up to this time to do, is to fashion our Motto into a broader curriculum, the significance of which transcends the slogan, translating into an axiom that is underpinned by a far deeper meaning.
The reality is that if our National Motto is to serve as a tool through which to help us carve out our wider destiny as a nation its essence has to be reflected in our social and political behaviour, so that beyond the artificial considerations that ‘divide’ us there is also the bigger picture of our national patrimony, which, setting aside our material wealth and our various other ‘artificial’ divisions, remains rooted in our unblemished sense of nationhood.
To say that our socio-political behaviour does not always reflect a true understanding of our national motto is to indulge in considerable understatement. Race and its attendant rancid socio-political offspring have become ‘tools’ fashioned and refined over time to erode a sense of nationhood. That has to end if our National Motto is to mean anything to us beyond words on paper.
To overcome this we must find a way of subsuming the vulnerabilities that repose in our seemingly embedded ethno-political divisions beneath the imperative of collectively protecting our country.
Oneness must not only be trumpeted when our neighbours to the west begin to ‘act up.’ We must leave them in a condition where they must search for fissures in our togetherness to find to their frustration that in the matter of our territorial integrity, none exist. Venezuela must be left searching for chinks in our domestic behavioural armour and finding none.
