Provocations from ‘Grangerites’

BY: ROBIN SINGH

One more day! This has been the strategy of the Granger cabal since 21st December 2018 one more day in power; one more day to file a legal challenge; one more day to spend; one more day to bankrupt us; one more day to sell state assets; one more day to plunder; one more day to frustrate the will of the people; one more day to defy all those who seek to keep the peace and restore democracy (for it has been lost).

The last 568 days have tested the patience, restraint, and decency of the Guyanese people. “We are a peaceful people, struggling the struggle, and we don’t ask for trouble, just ask around”, so goes the first stanza of Dave Martin’s patriotic song Not a Blade O’ Grass, and much of it holds true since the song first hit the airwaves in the ’70s.
But these are neither ordinary nor easy times. There is a real hunger in hundreds of communities; it is painful to watch people struggling the struggle with very little hope of providing decent meals for their families. Those who can help do so sometimes wondering if they would be the ones needing assistance tomorrow.

The very best of Guyana has been demonstrated in the way we have been our brothers’ keepers; conversely, the very worst has been shown by the Granger cabal’s callous disregard for the populace. The cabal’s energy is directed to plunder, the plight of the people be damned! The two billion dollars (and counting) COVID hotel/hospital conversion is a money pit from which funds are being siphoned while precious little is being done to alleviate national suffering. This inaction by the cabal has not gone unnoticed, and pressure/anger is building to spillover point.
Guyanese need to remain a ‘peaceful people’, for any devolution into violence would lose us within a forest dark, with the straightforward pathway all but lost, to paraphrase Alighieri.

David Granger has enlisted a cast of shameless characters in his quest to continuously delay the transition of administration to Dr. Irfaan Ali and the PPP/C, who were the clear winners of the elections of 2nd March 2020.
Keith Lowenfield’s submission of Mingo’s numbers is a show of contempt for all the persons who participated in the elections: the voters; the GECOM staff at every polling station; the party polling agents; the observer missions from the OAS, Commonwealth, Carter Center, CARICOM, UK, USA, Canada, AMCHAM and the PSC.
Granger then added insult to injury by engaging with CARICOM as “the most legitimate interlocutor”. Maybe Granger needs the CCJ to tell him what his own words mean.

It is an accepted truism that ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, and Guyana needs that ‘simple interrupted stitch’ in the form of personal sanctions for all of those seeking to benefit from electoral fraud. Without urgent action from international actors, this peaceful country would one day descend further into this hellish ‘inferno’ to a level lower than the current limbo. If/when that happens, we may as well replace the ‘Welcome to Guyana’ sign at Timehri with ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’.

Let us all come together and teach the Grangers of this world the meaning of the proverb, ‘Bucket ah guh ah well every day, one day di bottom ah guh drop out; meaning: If you repeatedly engage in the same risky behaviour every day, eventually it will end in disaster for you.

I cannot stress enough how desperately many are trying to control their actions in the face of the daily provocations from the ‘Grangerites’. Those incitements from Granger’s acolytes are aimed at creating tensions and causing an eruption of violence. The callous attempts to use the Black Lives Matter movement to cause division among Guyanese is reprehensible.

I end with a warning by way of a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy; it is intended for those who promote violence: “But fix thine eyes below; for draweth near
The river of blood, within which boiling is,
Whoe’er by violence doth injure others.”
(Canto XII, lines 46-48, page 61)