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By GHK Lall
The intensity of pent-up fury in this country is at an astonishing temperature. I would say that it is an alarming contemplation. This is what is confirmed by the turbulence pushing us all one way, then pulling us in another direction, and simultaneously. Today, it is about sex in the city: an underaged child, a vulnerable Amerindian child, a girl that is poor and weak and vulnerable to the appeals or pressures of her ogler. The stress includes her own family. Come to think of it, a million thrown around casually (as alleged) to make matters go away is not an opportunity to let go, something with which to play games. When it is 10 million, then that is a lifetime lifeline landing on one’s lap all at once. No questions asked, only keep mouth shut. Say nothing, deny everything, withdraw from everyone and everywhere.
What is alleged and may have looked like a grand bargain, suddenly isn’t so anymore. Events are overtaking events at breakneck speed. On each occasion that I thought there will be a pause in the rush of developments, there is a new low reached. It all started with the trials and tribulations of Minister Nigel Dharamall. It is also revealing about how traumatized sections of this nation have been in the advantages taken over them, the degradations piled on them. Those in power know how to exploit the weak, flex their muscles, project their masculinity, and take away the dignity of the oppressed. I walk away with this take: national culture writ large is now seeping again into the national consciousness.
Unsurprisingly, I absorb the sanctimonious pieties coming from PPP ministers, PPP pundits, and PPP condoners and racketeers of not only flesh, but of the blood and oxygen of this poor society -cash. They had delightedly attacked any Guyanese who asked about a man named Su. Now with the pungency and profanity of this kind of cheap sex in the air, all of them have found religion, become saintly, and talk or write a good game. About justice. About accountability. About what is patently hypocritical, and also revealing. Where were they before? What happened to their consciences before? Did they not have convictions then? Give a man enough rope, and he will turn around and hang the donor with it. Now everyone in the PPP is running for cover, from the Hon. Vice President Jagdeo, a man with his own touch and flares to all the other strange bedfellows clambering out from under the sheets. Listen to them: the law must take its course. The formerly blind now thinking. The hitherto deaf now smelling. The previously dumb now coming alive.
Separately, I read of another parent coming out and making allegations about what happened to her daughter. It takes a special mother to make unfair use of the circumstances now that keep boiling over. For some reason, I do not believe that there is a gold digger at work here; there is the ring of credibility all the way from the deep interior. What was long suspected is now slowing coming to the sanitization of light drip by embarrassing and painful drip.
It seems that the remote hinterlands were looked upon as lush hunting grounds by predators with power. It seems also that the vulnerable, poverty riddled hinterland population was seen by protected (or ignored) stalkers as fair and easy game to satiate their lusts. As I listen and look at these developments, I recall medieval times, and the droit de seigneur (rights of the master) that became the norm of the serfs, the oppressed, and the powerless. What fits this bill more than the plight of the indigenous community of Guyana?
Instead of our Governments mandating that their people put these poor in Guyana’s population on a pedestal, the reverse became the norm, given how they were and are preyed upon ruthlessly. A part-time job, a few pesos placed in the hand, and many a promise of more from where those came were used as visas to enter the homes, the hearts, and stain the honor. For some reason what allegedly started out with Nigel Dharmalall as an aberration has now surged into a political and governmental abomination. There is no shaking the intuition that what is coming to the fore is but the tip of the tip of a cancerous PPP leprosy that stalks this land and devours its frail and fearful. There is nothing proverbial about this; there is only the bestial.
As said earlier, some who have embraced only PPP images to heart have now seen it fit to come forward with guarded platitudes (for the record) and bland calls for justice to prevail. It is a fact of life and friendship, and from hard experience, that there are some people in a group who are bound to be nothing but trouble. Care is taken to disconnect and distance from them. The crisis for the PPP is that it is saturated so much with the corrupt and criminal from the high elevations to the low depressions. Where does one start to clean house? What would be left if a real purging of purveyors of perversity were to take place? It is said that a fish rots from the head, and Guyanese have been given comprehensive testimony of how this has seeped into and overtaken the length of the PPP body. Who is going to get rid of whom? Can Judas Iscariot take offense, and call out, Benedict Arnold? Or Kim Philby and Burgess McClean?
My position is that regardless of how this Dharamlall disaster unfolds, where it settles (for or against), some irreversible damage has been inflicted on the PPP, which was already at a low ebb. My bigger concern is what has been wrought upon the psyche of the Guyanese people. Surely, they should be concerned about what has surfaced so far. And surely, they have to be cringing from what this says about their precious leaders, their cherished heroes.
