One of Eric Williams’ famous declarations when launching the 30-year-long reign of the PNM in Trinidad back in 1956 was: “Fighting in the streets is over and politics in Parliament will now begin”. Sadly for us in Guyana, his contemporary Burnham, who’d escalated his “fighting in the streets” in Guyana to a literal racial civil war in the 60s to seize power, never weaned his party to confine politics to the civilized rules of democratic politics.
What with rigging elections from 1968 to 1985, with horses voting to the army seizing ballot boxes and murdering civilians, they expanded the arena of violence. Parliamentary democracy for the PNC was always interpreted cynically – with a wink and a blow to the solar plexus of the other political players. Some killings by police “encounters” (Koama/Dublin) with planted bombs in walkie-talkies (Rodney) or arbitrary torture after framed up charges (the De Willem 15) were some examples.
When they were ousted after 28 (long) years, the PNC’s violent street politics returned without skipping a beat – and Guyana’s known no lasting peace from 1997 to now. Some thought they’d learnt a lesson – that violence can careen out of control and consume us all when they recalibrated, changed their name to APNU, went into a coalition with the AFC, and returned to power. But it soon became clear they just couldn’t keep on the straight and narrow. The folk wisdom predicts once canines start “sucking egg”, they just can’t stop!
And so after the PNC returned to their rigging ways in 2020, and when that was stymied, they extended their violence into the hallowed chambers of Parliament. They went where even Burnham never dared go!! Imagine seizing the Speaker’s Mace; fighting with the Sergeant at Arms over it and brukkin’ up the communications center!! Ever since Aug 2nd, 2020 if it’s not the Courts, it’s the streets with their clenched fists and incendiary race-based rhetoric. We all know what happened at Mon Repos Market after the Opposition’s “peaceful” march from Golden Grove!!
Right now the same set of provocateurs are busy stirring their cauldron of witches’ brew over social media to get PNC supporters into the streets to wreak havoc and mayhem. But we know what’s going on, don’t we? All of this simulated righteous indignation about “installed regimes” and “bloated lists” are just ploys to rile them up and precipitate the violence in the streets that’s been their modus operandi since the 1960s. Interestingly the returned PNC leader ain’t biting!!
Your Eyewitness figures he might’ve learnt the lesson that violence really never solves anything after being used as cannon fodder since he was a young man fifty years ago!!
…in gas exploitation
So the kvetching from the Opposition and their camp followers continues unabated on the gas-to-shore project at Wales. But hey, didn’t the VP lay out all the rationales for the need for cheaper electricity to kick-start our industrialization drive before proceeding? Your Eyewitness believes that these armchair “experts” have no idea of what went down in the Wales community after the PNC shuttered the sugar factory. It’s devastation plain and simple!! If they did, maybe they’d echo the original weeping Prophet Jeremiah: “I will weep and wail for the mountains and take up a lament concerning the wilderness grasslands. They are desolate and untraveled, and the lowing of cattle is not heard. The birds have all fled and the animals are gone.”
The government is clearly committed to killing several birds with the natural gas big stone generating power for the next thirty years. Those who want to save the planet should speak to the big foreign emitters.
Our forests gonna cover our increased emission!
…of Biden?
There’s a heated discussion on whether Biden was “bullied” by some Democratic colleagues to step aside as the party’s presidential candidate this November. We know from his own words that HE thought he could do the job…so wasn’t he bullied from that stance?
