Guyanese political leadership is vile and reprehensible

Dear Editor,

I seek the courtesy of sharing a few thoughts with those still interested in Guyana. Though said differently, in the fullness of its sum, it is the unimaginable unmentionable pathos of Guyana.

At the hour of our greatest challenge as a nation, in the once rich tapestry of its peoples, the best that the leaders of this society can deliver are frenzies of rancorous division, of the vilest and most bitter partisanship. This is the best that the best in the PNC and PPP can deliver at the time of our greatest challenge. This is also, the moment of our greatest promise. If anyone of them, and the newer ones, dare to tell me that he or she is about love of this country, I call that person an unmitigated deceiver of the first order. It is a rancid bunch of decayed older men, of already rotted younger men and women.

Today, in public, I call them out as the worst of the worst. There is no criminal in this country, whether behind bars or roaming free, that could be as heinous as our political class, given what has been done to this society historically, given what is being done to it today. Any institutions and persons that do not find favour with their frivolities and asininities are automatically branded in the most caustic and reprehensible terms that range from the deceptively scurrilous (at the most charitable end of considerations) to the wickedly racist (at the demonizing other end).

This is how pathetic we are: racists are calling public officers and public contributors racists when there is thoughtful and honest disagreement with positions taken. And the piteous nature of Guyanese politics extends and confirms the blight when those on the other side, who once were guilty of the same terribly ugly behaviour, rush forward to applaud. Local politics and local politicians have no bottom in the endless depths to the madness, the deviousness, and the assorted numerous other sicknesses. Guyana! Behold leaders. These are the saviours. Caesar had his Brutus, Jesus had his Judas, and Guyana has its politicians.

My fellow Guyanese on either side of the divide are welcome to embrace their respective heroes, I distance from all of these sick sons of this soil. They are taking us down and will never stop doing so; they just do not have what it takes to be different by doing what is right and good for this country. It is why, and I say this with every confidence, that the peoples of this country are unfamiliar with something as basic as progress in the last six decades. I speak not of some meager GDP figure; I speak of human progress. I suggest a scrutiny of how the racist partisanship has curled the nation into a fetal position. Thus, Guyana remains unborn, unlearning, and unpromising.

Guyanese need the critical and the creative to lift them out of the deep end of the sewer. What they get is uninterrupted indoctrinations where that same critical and creative are taken to newer and newer heights to gain the upper hand and perpetuate the criminal folly, the narrow ideology of race supremacy and race fear. Guyana is not even an idea; it is not an experiment or an adventure. Guyana is an unfinished joke. Yet here Guyanese political leaders are thinking that they are the smartest people around. I label such men and women failures and frauds, cheap confidence tricksters, and that is only the beginning of what they represent to the core of their being and the vastness of their narrow, miniscule visions for this country. It is long known that oil (and clearly, we know nothing about oil here) attracts the worst human scum: fortune hunters, hustlers, and the worst of opportunists. We already had those here: Guyanese politicians. I tarnish myself by talking of them.

After all the raging and hating and dividing, I wait to marvel at the nation building. Instead of building, they exhaust. I want no part of these people. I have no regard for them. I expect the worst from them, be it this one or next, whether old or new.

Yours truly,
GHK Lall