By GHK Lall- I hear Pres Ali on unity. Clap softly. More than hearing could follow. Spirited applauding flow steadily. From his call for national unity, this is my humble call to him. In the spirit of Independence, the words are gentle, recommendations quietly offered.
Presidential pontificating at select moments about unity is an opening. Policies and practices must harmonize consistently. Speeches backed by policies that inspire unity. Policies reinforced by practices. They haven’t. Start with parliament. The votes and visions of Guyanese who thought less of the PPP have been thwarted, sabotaged, derailed, and denied. Neither foreigners nor natives should be moved to plead: reconvene parliament. The Hon Speaker didn’t falter. He followed orders.
The source is in the presidency, with respect to Minister Teixeira. I think that Pres Ali can do better. He knows better. He knows that when Guyanese who voted for the PNC and WIN absorb the lockdown of parliament that’s not conducive to unity. If he didn’t know before, he knows now. When the precious ballot of one citizen is tarnished, minimized, then degraded so contemptuously, then calling for national unity is more than about hollow words. It’s a failure that represents admission of disinterest, inaction, and contentment with where matters are.
Pres Ali has sacks of words and phrases proper for different occasions. I commend him for using Independence to call for unity. But how Mr. President, when in the Office of the President itself, there are racists and demagogues who still ply their trades? Whose scripts set this country afire before, and still do so today, only a shade less crudely. Amid such an audible, tangible horror, calling for national unity, Mr. Ali, is mocking the peace of honest and harmonious-minded Guyanese. I go deeper.
When Pres Ali presents faces different from the PPP base, and holds some of those as examples of inclusion, he inflicts on himself and nation an unhealable wrong. For some he displays, as though science and sociology experiments, are from the bottom of the barrel, the dregs, of their people. Their sordid pasts, the obscene bargains made to defeat the law, drain calls for unity of authenticity, of life. If these are the luminaries from the other sides of Guyanese society, then national unity is a lost cause. Those faces are dismissed as representing nothing and no one. They horrify, not unify.
To Excellency Ali, respectfully: when Guyanese cry about food prices and poverty’s pains, and they are mocked, that’s not unity inducing. It’s dividing further. Conquered and banished should be poverty or any hungry in this Republic of plenty. When a Stabroek News that gave voice to the trials of ordinary citizens (to contrarian voices) is deliberately and unceremoniously toppled, then fostering unity is an invitation to a game, a setup, a fix. It is not real. It is presidential lip service. It is saying something for the sake of something, because it suits the setting.
Pres Ali should know that celebrating $100,000 in cash to strapped and lashed Guyanese is not helpful to unity for one simple reason, a product of local reality. When dependent Guyanese collect $100,000 by check, they not how PPP family, PPP favored, and PPP already full-to-overflowing are collecting, grabbing, and banking $100 million in comparison.
By hook or by crook, and it is mostly one kind of Guyanese in Ali’s One Guyana. Unity is not served by an array of protective State institutions headed by Guyanese with one mentality: to coverup banditries and the cost to the treasury. One type of Guyanese is enriched, the other types are embalmed alive. How does unity breathe in conditions where different standards apply: one for PPP protected, one for other Guyanese?
Pres Ali ought to know that when the police and press are weaponised against those perceived to be anti-PPP, then he himself assumes the stature of the greatest enemy of national unity. Somebody in State media, Freedom House, and State House, should ensure that Excellency Ali gets these messages. My hope is that they drive him to be and do differently, and not deep fry him. When the oil money is used to enrich a cabal, while whole communities are condemned to scratching out a shabby daily existence that doesn’t cement unity, it shatters harmony. When one village is bypassed for infrastructure improvements, while another is built-up and brightened, calling for unity is a joke best left unspoken.
In sum, the scattered and seething pieces are there for Pres Ali to change course and knit together, hold together, and inspire to move forward together. He hasn’t never done so. He can start now. The most earnest of Independence wishes, to Excellency Ali and family. To all of my fellow Guyanese. May national unity cease to be elusive. May genuine commitment to national unity infuse and suffuse.
