We cannot afford to underestimate authoritarian streak of this regime

Dear Editor,

December 21, 2018, March 31, June 18, July 12, August 31, and September 18, 2019, are important and significant dates since they will go down in history as a struggle to uphold the constitution and democracy in Guyana from a gang of chieftains within the machinery of the current caretaker APNU+AFC government. Election and post-election dates will have to be added sometime shortly to this sedulous struggle since the regime is self-trapped in election-phobia masked under the guise and gospel of credibility. The President decides when elections will be held not GECOM.

Concomitantly, any attempts to draw the line of distinction from the days of rigging and delaying of the general elections between 1968 and 1992 and from 2015 to now have become delusory. The regime has been successful in bedding and engineering both periods into an elaborated art of political bullying. The refusal of the Cabinet to resign comes readily to come mind. There is, however, one distinction. During Forbes Burnham’s bio-nationalistic dictatorship what you saw was what you received but with this regime, it is difficult to determine which way it will swing. Some illegal Ministers have now entered into the realm of quietism since the No-Confidence Motion. Someone quipped to me that “Nagamootoo and Broomes na talk, talk too much now.” We cannot afford to underestimate the instability and authoritarian streak of this regime exemplified by its neurotic defiance of the rulings of the courts. If these behaviours continue, which seem likely, they bode ill for growth and development and a loss of effective control of the economy to outside forces.

There is an added strip to the regime’s marauding intentions. The ingress of foreigners which has in the past been swept under the rug has now received attention with supersonic speed, arousing civic curiosity. The recent meeting between the illegal Minister of Citizenship Winton Felix and Deputy Director of the State Assets Recovery Agency Aubrey Heath-Reteymer on one side and 60 foreign nationals from the African continent and Haiti on the other has raised more doubts rather than determination in bringing confidence among skeptics about granting citizenship to foreign nationals.

Two questions ought to be repeated before any optimism can be acknowledged. Why would these individuals want to hold such a clandestine meeting when so much is shrouded in secrecy as to who, when and how citizenship be granted, and how come no one in the caretaker regime has not been investigated for the abuse of state resources? One would expect Reteymer to focus on his job. In four years, not one individual within this regime has ever been investigated by SARA for any infraction but yet evidence abounds here, there and everywhere.

Yours faithfully,

Lomarsh Roopnarine