Our old way of governance is over

Dear Editor,

As usual, I am already looking ahead and moving on to the challenges before us.  Before us as individuals, as separate, divided, and hostile groups, and before us a society.  Most Guyanese would shrug off disdainfully, but I stick to my knitting, and to what I assess the days ahead promise.

Like it or lash it, a new government is slated to be in place in a few days.  By my measurement, it appears to be the coalition, compliments of the CEO’s figures.  It is what brings swooning to the coalition, and much cursing in the opposition.  But that will be that, and it is on to stage two, with petitions, protests, and pleas for sanctions.  The first two are within the control of the PPP, the responses to the last are not.  Quite frankly, I do not see much of anything coming out of that reaching.  Time will tell.

On the other hand, I need no sliver of time to appreciate that our old way of governance is over.  That is, of winner takes all, and better luck next time.  It is clear, and I have said so repeatedly: no one party alone can govern here anymore; and certainly, neither of the two major parties would allow the other to rule the roost efficiently or comfortably.  It may have been so before, not anymore.  There is too much bad blood, too much at stake, too much invested, and too much that would be lost by being at the margins of power.  There will be confronting.  Because any of the two major political groups settling for the monotony and tranquility of peaceful coexistence has just about signed their own death warrant.  Their presence would fade into nothingness with time.  For even if the other party were to cheat and rip off the citizens of this country of bed and board, it would still have enough to dole out and spread around generously.  People could be swayed, and things fixed well.  If there are doubts about this, I recommend reexamining the many lessons from this revealing season of elections.  We may think we know much about what happened, but we do not know the half of it.

Next, the president had extended a nuanced branch around the early part of June when he muttered something publicly about shared governance.  Not surprisingly, it was immediately denounced and rejected before the ink had dried.  Nonetheless, in view of my street level conclusion that governance must be different going forward, this is going to happen, with men kicking and screaming all the way to the marriage ceremony.  It is this or nothing.  In this political scenario, the vaunted and much relied-upon foreigners will do the heavy lifting.  My sense is that this may already be in motion and gaining strength, as heels are dug in at the leadership level, and none as rigidly as at the coalition heights.  Near then, the second bubble the president had blown was about nullifying the elections and starting over.  I think that that one is wholly off the table now.

Then, to repeat the obvious, there is so much real work, very hard work, in front of this country that it bends the mind.  Everywhere I turn and look, the challenges are there: economy, constitution, electoral agency, race relations, crime management, border management, oil management, infrastructure development, and institutional rehabilitations (almost all of them), and much more.  As I contemplate all this, I believe that this country has to do more than rediscover and reengineer itself.  It must redefine itself.  I have already started that process internally, and because of how I respond to life’s developments, I am well on the way to such redefinition.  Unfortunately, I do not think that the overwhelming majority of fellow citizens could do so spiritedly and successfully.

And now I near the last challenge I express in public today.  I watched and listened and read as we bounced all over the place in the long winter of the current elections and as we shriveled and refused to grow, other than besides the same partisan lines, the same rough race outlines, the usual narrow mental visions.  None of this is promising.  I am yet to see the calibre of people, who can take us past the next hills to higher plateaus.  They are too much like their political fathers of old, like their nearby political siblings, and like the larger population of political strangers.  This is true of both the much talked-about young and the usually condemned old.  They lack the authenticity, integrity, and sagacity to carry us anywhere.  Most know some of them; I discern almost all of them.  Which place can be better with a breed like this?  This, arguably, is our most insurmountable of heavy challenges.

Yours faithfully,

GHK Lall