Never before in our country’s history has the erosion of our nation’s democratic values eroded to such an alarming extent

Dear Editor,

Caretaker President David Granger and his three plus seven cabal have pushed Guyana and its people to the precipice. He has his knee on the throat of the nation staring down an abyss fraught with disastrous consequences.
What we are witnessing is an attempt to wheelbarrow Guyana back to the past with some changes to the script and in the cast, but the objective remains the same, stay put!
It’s like backwards ever, forward never.

This time around however, the Guyanese people have repudiated electoral banditry and have refused to willingly participate in their own suppression and surrender to authoritarian rule.
Guyana’s parliamentary democracy faces grave danger of collapsing into tyrannical rule by a bureaucratic elite bent solely on personal power and material aggrandizement.

As the masquerading at court by the jesters continue, Guyana stands delicately poised a few steps away from being branded a pariah or rogue state by the international community thanks to the selfish and power hungry clique of three plus seven.

Mr. Granger must know that just because he’s not smelling it, means he’s not making it. In other words, he cannot feign ignorance of the treacherous waters into which he has consciously steered the ship of state due to his reckless, quasi constitutional actions and his refusal to concede his loss of power.

Mr. Granger has put Guyana to shame especially when consideration is given to the fact that other nations have held their elections long after ours and have already sworn in their Head of State or Prime Minister.
Viewed in today’s context, two video clips of March and May 2015 respectively, currently circulating on social media, reveal the unashamed hypocrisy of Mr. Granger, who, as the then Opposition Leader, could be seen and heard crowing over the speed with which a declaration of the results of elections ought to be made and how sanctions can impact Guyana.

And as if to add insult to injury, Mr. Granger unabashedly, keeps peddling the myth to the gullible and unsuspecting, that with his magic potion and his abra ka dabra incantation, he can work a miracle that would allow his disreputable coalition to remain in office. It is called, living in a fool’s paradise.
When consideration is given to the track record of the three plus seven cabal since the passage of the No Confidence Motion, they certainly cannot be categorized as sensible, right-thinking politicians.

Any attempt to assess the cabal through the eyes of a normal person would be flawed, since we are dealing with a bunch of individuals who seem to be either Amtorians or Pfifltriggians visiting from Mars or Venus.
This brings us to the rather strange, if not bizarre uttering by Mr. Granger outside State House, to what he described as “some bad elements” who attempted to “manipulate” the votes.

This is not only a far cry from the truth, it is phantasmic, crude and an unadulterated attempt to deceive.
Here we have legitimate voters who won the elections being labelled ‘bad elements’ by those who try barefacedly to steal an election. It is logic turned upside down.
To condemn the winners of the March 2, elections as ‘bad elements’ is to be totally insensitive and insulting with sanctimonious mockery towards hundreds of thousands, who voted the APNU+AFC out of office and to harbour a delusion that ‘It is I who am the victor, not the vanquished.’

Within the meaning of CARICOM’s ‘Charter for Civil Society’, and the OAS ‘Inter-American Democratic Charter,’ Granger’s behaviour is a reflection of the extent to which the coalition’s threadbare ethical and moral values have fallen.
Never before in our country’s history has the erosion of our nation’s democratic values eroded to such an alarming extent.

Efforts to pull our country away from the precipice was vividly demonstrated thus far, by the people’s choice during the count at the place of poll and the recount at the Convention Center; at the High Court, the Appeal Court and the Caribbean Court of Justice where learned Counsels representing the opposition parties fought tenaciously to win legal battles in the name of justice and fair play as well as by the thousands in the letter columns of the dailies and social media, who wrote in support of democracy, free and fair elections, for democratic and inclusive governance. The international community has thrown out a lifeline to rescue Guyana from the clutches of the cabal.
These antecedents if not halted, pose a serious threat to our democratic way of life. Cumulatively, they hang ominously like the sword of Damocles over the nation. This ignominious trajectory must be rejected, less too late! too late be the cry.

Guyanese, irrespective of race, class or political persuasion must not allow the three plus seven cabal to make us gaze helplessly into the abyss of failure and destruction.
When one of Mr. Granger’s own supporters shouted out aloud, “Tell us what we want to hear, not what you want to tell us,” during the fracas outside State House that afternoon, what was he signalling to his leader? What was it he wanted hear? And, what was it he was not interested in hearing from Granger?

Was the man responding to his violent impulses? Did he feel morally obligated to do something after what he was continuously fed by Granger? Was he asking Granger to tell him to take to the streets to uproot the peaceful lives of law abiding Guyanese and to terrorize and drive fear in the business community?

Had the man lost faith in his leader in light of the constant lies and elections fatigue knowing that Granger had lost the elections but was not prepared to concede so that the nation could move on?
Did the man go away feeling satisfied with what Granger told him about the ‘bad elements’ and that “we will continue to fight to make sure your votes are counted?” Did this make sense to the man whose common sense told him otherwise?
In the current circumstances, Mr. Granger must recognize that a large body of his supporters has come to the realization that the coalition has lost the elections.

Compounded by the excruciating conditions imposed on the nation as a result of COVID-19, the cabal of three plus seven must, hard as it might be, console themselves with the thought that conceding defeat might be a better option and a source of comfort because with it ‘comes a calm passage made across many a bad night.’
The longer the cabal of three plus seven refuses to concede, the longer we will stare into the abyss. And if we gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into us.

Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee