Dear Editor,
I read Amanza Walton-Desir’s letter and laughed. Not a big laugh, just a chuckle; the kind a man lets out when he hears a bad story told with too much confidence.
She says the Government has crossed a dangerous line. A dictatorship is upon us. The proof? Two words printed on a passport. One Guyana.
That’s the march to tyranny. Not censorship; not police knocking on your door in the night looking for empty tins of sardine or bags of flour; not men disappearing; not the assassination of political activists and respected academics. No. Two words in a little book. It is terrifying, really. Almost — if you forget everything you ever knew about our history.
So, let’s talk about dictatorship. The real kind, not the kind politicians invent for press releases and columns in the papers; the kind Guyanese lived through. The kind where the party was the state and the freedom to vote was not a right, but empty rhetoric. 1968, 1973, 1980, 1985: the years when elections were won before they were held; when votes were counted in secret rooms; when democracy was a word on paper, not something that existed in real life.
Then came 2020, and they tried it again: same trick, different century. The numbers didn’t add up. They got caught. Then they tried to gaslight an entire country.
And just this year, 2025, in Parliament, Aubrey Norton stood up and smiled as he spoke about the good old days. The days when books were banned; when flour was banned; when men went to jail for buying sandfish, er, saltfish. That was power. That was control.
Walton calls One Guyana a political slogan. Two words, one of which is the name of the country, not a political party, echoing and encapsulating the actual national motto and its message of unity: One People, One Nation, One Destiny.
According to her: “The use of state resources for political branding is a classic sign of democratic backslide and authoritarianism, and blurs the line of distinction between party and State.”
That criticism is rich, coming from someone whose party stamped its name and colours on everything that didn’t move fast enough: the David G buses, painted in party colours and branded like a campaign prop; the repainting of State House in her party’s hues; Government buildings, entire public spaces, turned into billboards for one party’s rule. This wasn’t a case of alleged PNC branding, but the reality of less than ten years ago. Walton had no principled problem with state branding then.
As for “democratic backslide”, we did not hear opprobrium on the chorus of international condemnation on the attempted rigging of elections in 2020. A mountain of evidence is somehow less significant of dictatorial descent than two words promoting unity on a passport.
Let’s be fair: there must be opposition; there must be questioning; there must be criticism. That is democracy. But the criticism should be honest; it should be about real things. History has shown us what a dictatorship looks like, and it has never been found in the pages of a passport.
Sincerely,
Alfonso De Armas
