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Former US President Barack Obama rolled backed time to rollout one his sparkling deliveries for the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night. He is always good for a glorious homerun, isn’t he? “I don’t want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided.” Me too! And for the edification of all Guyanese, including President Ali and former president Jagdeo, if my Me too call and cause must be a one-man movement, then so it will be.
To be candid, I do not think that President Ali and former president Jagdeo have any political use for a Guyana that’s not bitter and divided. To drive home the point, a country that is not bitter and divided does not mesh with what I believe that they stand for, who they are deep inside.
These two less-than-stellar Guyanese top dogs, their surrogates, and the rest of Guyana are welcomed to interpret what I just placed in the public domain as liberally as they wish. Scarcely an opportunity is allowed to pass by without it being seized to deepen the bitterness and to wring further open the already yawning divide. Test 1: when was the last time either of them (Ali or Jagdeo) spoke anywhere on any issue without a divisive diatribe against the PNC featuring prominently?
National leaders in an era of great new wealth do not connive and calculate to deliver what favors a few and then only some of a particular hue, while distancing from the rest, contemptuously dismissing them to fend for themselves. I insist that what Drs. Ali and Jagdeo have lavishly doled out to some Guyanese (the contractor class, the sugar class, and the corrupt and connected class, among other such mostly crooked classes) have wrenched this country farther apart in its season of once unimagined bounties.
Those classes (obvious for the consistency of their color scheme, even with the stray glimmers of contrast) benefit immensely from the newfound bonanza. This is while the bulk of Guyanese of all colours are left running on empty and forced to live in agony. I contend that this is the perfect recipe enriched with bitter and divisive ingredients that has become the national stew. So, Guyanese sizzle and simmer at high heat. Let there be no mistake: bitter and divided is the Guyana of today.
I assert that rushing this late in the day to handout contracts to the indigenous community is what leaves that population of originals bitter and divided. Pittances are plasters that paste for a time but don’t represent any authentic presidential prowess. If President Ali doesn’t know that, then I respectfully recommend that he seeks an enhancement of his education at any institution of learning that would have him. Should those doors be slammed in his face, then the fallback suggestion is that the president seeks his educational improvements from Guyana’s school of life. There is a world of learning from the daily struggles of Guyanese in that 24/7/366 classroom of instruction.
When the President of Bitterness and the Vice President of Division are always inseparably, irreversibly, fixated on the past (more to follow another time), then that Guyana can only be, always be, a country that’s bitter and divided. To President Obama, I say thanks, bro for that Yo Yo Ma moment of magic in Chicago. When President Bitterness and VP Divisiveness can only rail and remind about the PNC, then they are yet not about the soothing and unifying leadership that this country so sorely needs.
How does burning the PNC in daily effigies heal this hurting country, Mr. President, Mr. VP? Even if (if) the PNC is the sole denounceable political presence in Guyana, how does that knit and mend a country that is made up of its blood brothers and sisters? I would invite any enlightenment on any smidgen of healing power in what has become all that Ali and Jagdeo have been about.
President Ali has made a precarious living with his clever construction of ‘One Guyana.’ One Guyana for whom, Mr. President? Certainly, not for Guyanese teachers. One Guyana made up of what kind of people in the local demographics, Mr. President? Most definitely, it cannot be for the people of Mocha so callously bulldozed out of their homes, the true reasons for which are now beginning to seep into the public arena. I want one Guyanese to tell this Guyanese how that is knitting and healing and not embittering and dividing. There is fairness and truth, then there are these calumnies that stand as the inarguable facts of Guyana’s many injustices.
I continue with President Ali for a moment longer: One Guyana, I hear loud and clear, sir. But why not for public servants calling and crying for a livable wage in the richest country in the world? When some citizens are compelled to live on their knees with their hands outstretched. When there are Guyanese reduced to begging for a fair wage, there is nothing about any One Guyana vision. It cannot be about oneness. Because that vision is so blindingly biased it says so much.
Only a certain type of citizen could feel comfortable believing that mantra, what is a sound byte. Those who were the known village idiots that found themselves by the push and pull of circumstances in the bright city, then promptly lost their heads and their footing. Bitter and divided, Guyana is. Next year will prove how intensive, how extensive, it is.
