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There appears to be a palpable fear of a focused national discussion on issues related to ethnic and religious competition and of distributive equity. These are significant fault lines in our current political construct. The government has responded to the evidence with more desperate actions and gaslighting while engaging in walkabouts and trinket distribution to showcase the President’s generosity notwithstanding the fact that his abject lack of grace has been central in his public outings as he publicly berates and verbally assaults citizens who disagree with him.
No amount of random window dressing and token giveaways will resonate with thinking citizens. Even the recent “give-away” of one billion dollars to Guysuco will further collective contempt for the foolishness that constitutes governance in the current dispensation. It is even more disheartening that even an occurrence such as an appearance by the governing party at the parliamentary PAC meetings is becoming a rarity as the PPP continues its contempt for the citizens and abdicates its fiduciary role in administering Guyana’s new found wealth.
The assessment that Ali has missed his chance to morph into a president of consequence and change the minds of the thousands of citizens who view him as a fraudster, given the 19 charges he managed to get his minion DPP to dismiss, is profound. He has remained vacuous in his public pronouncements even though he pretends to be bold and visionary. His recent laughable announcement of training 150,000 coders in a country where more than sixty percent of 6th grade students fail to pass math, points to his penchant for flawed and deficient analyses. His Education Minister should perhaps advise him of the reality of her persistent failure to prepare a significant percentage of children to compete globally in science and technology!
Equally disturbing is the most recent and ensuing chaos in our beloved homeland provoked by the charge of distributive inequity in the government’s approach to our national patrimony which compelling and alarming evidence shows favor their ethnic group and political supporters. This issue exposes the brazen and ill-advised political strategy of the PPP to pauperize perceived supporters of the opposition. The absence of a national moral ethos that supports economic parity for all in the sharing of the national patrimony continues to be ignored by the mandarins of the PPP who seem committed to continue this ethnic/economic heist which has been in place for a total of almost 33 years of PPP rule no championed by Bharat Jagdeo, a politician of grandiose ideas and even grander failures.
The PPP in another demonstration of moronic public policy and repugnant bullying used the Guyana Police Force to engage in the illegal act of destroying vendors stalls on New Market Street operating with the permission of the Georgetown Mayor & City Council! Illegal because New Market Street is, by law, not a Public road, and as such not subject to the control of the Minister but rather to the Georgetown Municipality administered by the Mayor.
In rejecting this outrageous act, the Mayor of Georgetown, Pandit Ubraj Narine was most outraged and indignant at the blatant disrespect of the Council, and the usurpation of its authority by the action of the Central government in this matter. His public questioning of the reason for their administrative and open abuse of government power was met with a brutal and shameful display of their political excesses, as the full weight of the coercive power of the State was brought down upon the Chief Citizen of the Georgetown Municipality! He was immediately arrested on trumped charges of racial incitement, and his status as a member of the Guyana Defence Force Reserve was canceled forthwith at the direction of the Military High Command, which sits the President at its apex as Commander –in-Chief.
But, the PPP by resorting to its sole political triple play – State violence, political bullying and intimidation will only serve to strengthen the resolve of the majority of citizens of Georgetown to again reject their efforts to dictate the fate of their city as they stand resolutely with their Mayor against the dictatorial imposition of the PPP government upon their daily lives!
The opposition must contemplate a strategy for highlighting this political gangsterism to the wider world. There is no doubt that investors will be impacted by the ensuing chaos and the systemic corruption. The urgent challenge is to find a solution to this unfolding disaster. Ali has demonstrated an inability to project a vision for Guyana as he becomes more comfortable with the fear this PPP dictatorship has delivered since being installed in office based on the counting of invalid votes.
