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The problem of Guyana is not the reactionary oppressed. It is the iniquitous, corrupt dictators of this regime. Our collective consciousness must shift from that of being the helpless oppressed to being actional agents catalysing socio-economic and political change through focused efforts that will earn the support of our Guyanese brothers and sisters as well as friends in the international community committed to good governance.
The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has taken our oil wealth, using same to enrich themselves and leverage support from political hustlers, locally and abroad. We cannot be fooled by talk of one Guyana, when in fact they are two Guyanas, one for the Guyanese oligarchs some of whom are now expanding beyond laundered ill-gotten wealth to more mainstream business activities. Even as they accumulate wealth, the other Guyana, the poor, is getting poorer and public servants continue to experience a decline in real income.
There is no doubt the PPP is systematically eroding and dismantling the administrative systems of accountability by appointing loyalists who willingly undermine established rules, regulations and protocols. This is seen in the armed services and through every government institution.
After years of government excesses, abuse and violence against the people, history has taught us – that there is a limit to everything. There was a limit to what the enslaved and those who joined them in condemning and seeking freedom for African peoples from physical bondage: a limit to what colonies took before the forces of emancipation and independence mobilised in oneness.
The PPP is willfully creating an environment of and for violence for it keeps the masses divided along racial lines. The colonial oppressed of India rose up in pre independence struggles and their uprising was not all peaceful or of a nature of the Mahatma, African Americans fought after World War II and still fight a system of inequalities for social justice.
We must take control of stories of our struggles and expose the lying narratives of the PPP. We the people of Guyana, the marginalised and deprived exhibit normal human reactions stemming from the circumstances of daily PPP violence unleashed on its citizens.
The longer the oppressed remain silent the harder the struggle for freedom. Guyanese have tolerated too much of PPP excesses from violence of lies and hate which they nurture, to the murders of young Africans by government associated death squads, the creation of narco militarised state, police tortures, shooting of unarmed public servants, incarceration of Mark Benschop, murder of journalist Ronald Waddell to attempts to steal African ancestral lands and sabotage of the wealthy African class.
Today we must put in context the responses of the oppressed when all systems to bring their alleviation fail or are ignored by the PPP. They refuse to have meaningful engagement but accuse the Opposition, they refuse to be fair, to exercise good democracy, to allow peaceful coexistence but are quick to use the ill-advised words of frustrated people to distract from their evils, accusing them of the potential for violence.
Guyanese must awaken to the PPP tactics of distraction. Be wise, focused, vocal and resistant to their attempts to subjugate and enslave us. Give no reason, or the slightest opportunity for them to take the spotlight off of the real terrorists among them, their covert and overt criminal acts, their oppression, anti-democratic practices, state sanctioned murders and police excess, their fake and uneven development and crooked developers, their friends of notoriety and infamy and their provocation of violence in this land that will threaten the interests of all.
Civil society, business community, every decent citizen and the international community must act to ensure this government changes its way of governance.