By GHK Lall- The People’s National Congress (PNC) came out of its tent on the run. There was fire in its eye, as if its hair was on fire. Layoff from beating up and trying to beatdown Dr. Terrence Campbell. Doan mess wid he. He is wan ah wee. Truth aint gat fear, don’t frikken nobody. Way to go folks. And the PNC quickly got company.
For there was the Alliance For Change (AFC) adding its voice and lending its weight against the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Government’s war on Dr. Terrence Campbell for speaking out about what have become “rubber stamps” and what now represents an utter “waste of time.” I could have saved him the effort, those granite-face Guyanese in high places didn’t just become “rubberstamps”. They always were, which is why they last so long; just refill the pad with red ink, and their utility continues merrily along.
Guyana needs more people speaking their minds. Guyanese need more voices than the lone ones crying out of the wilderness. Guyana needs what does not spare Drs. Ali and Jagdeo from the bind in which they have placed themselves, the grind that presses both of them into a frothy pulp. When an attorney general refuses to speak out against abuses heaped on citizens, then he is an attorney of what first and always?
Is he not an attorney of politics alone, regardless of the harms done to the noble regard for law that should dominate, may I ask? When business is done wrong in other parts of the world, there is genuine accounting; in Guyana, when the business of the people is done wrong, there is abusing and attempts at intimidating all the way from the top. There’s misusing of either the Guyana Police Force, or the Guyana Revenue Authority. There is always the hooligan squad of the PPP Government. I am hearing that it is the ruling party’s phantom squad revived and put into action just in time for the upcoming elections.
I now take this matter of what Guyana and Guyanese need with increasing urgency to another level. Guyana and Guyanese are in dire need of the PNC and AFC rising up in righteous wrath, when the law is breached (by the PPP Government); when constitutional rights are desecrated (by the PPP Government); and when the law-abiding in Guyana is made into cannon fodder by an out-of-control and roguish PPP Government. The victimised and demonized should not have to be PNC supporters or friends.
The targets could be any Guyanese. But once he or she is a citizen in good standing with the law, the PNC must make their unearned troubles its own. The PPP Government and its leaders, who grow increasingly desperate, do not pick and choose those that they wish to stalk. They lash out and seek to ‘lick down’ whoever has the masculine apparatus to get in the face of the government and its leaders. They smear and revile those who challenge them on issues where the oil money is mismanaged (even stolen). They go after those who question why the law is subverted for political objectives. Both government and leaders rage at those who expose how leaders have the greatest difficulty speaking to truth, justice, a level playing field, equity.
Why do the general standards of civilised people and democratic governance cause such a storm of anxiety and fury in the PPP? What could it have done that makes its senior people lose control, go ballistic, as though there are so many dark secrets to hide, what shatters the façade? The carefully constructed façade is porous, now falling apart at accelerating rates. These are the issues, where the PNC and AFC must be relentless.
The government has shown that it can be remorseless to keep up the appearance that it is clean. Like hell, it is. If the government is clean, then Guyanese who protest must be of some mysterious criminal class. Guyanese know who are the real criminals in this country, and they are not ordinary citizens, not those that the government ostracise. These are a handful of the issues, the crimes, on which the PNC and AFC must focus every fiber, and keep before the eyeballs of members in the ruling brain trust.
Well-intentioned citizens operating on their own are not the opposition, should never be seen as such. Hence, the opposition cannot be sporadic. It must be sustained and unsparingly sharp in its efforts to drum some sense in the PPP Government’s head. The first message is that there are no walkovers here. The second is that rulers will be made to feel the heat, and that it will be without letup.
The third is that the bar has been raised, and a new season is about to begin, if not already started. It is my belief that the democratic process allows much room for the give-and-take of reasonable exchanges among principled men and women. It is my belief also that the PPP Government has been given too much space in which to operate unchallenged.
The PNC and AFC have come out on behalf of one citizen. Both can burnish their credentials, win some fence sitters over. Energy and consistency are what the territory requires. Stop picking spots, start being an irresistible force for better.
