Your Eyewitness is writing this on Independence Day – May 26. He knows that, this year, there’s no celebration by the Government because of the Mahdia tragedy. We’re a country in mourning, but, for him, there’s NEVER been any celebration. What was there ever to celebrate?? That Burnham sold out his country by conniving with the Yanks and Brits to remove a democratically elected government and then call it “democracy”?? So, democracy’s a game wherein you can change the rules in the middle of the game in such a way to deliver victory to the leader willing to betray his country?? That’s not cricket, is it?
Hasn’t this set the precedent for the PNC’s present incarnation and their myrmidons demanding “shared governance” whenever they lose?? How can we ever have a stable political system when the colonial power showed the loser that rules don’t really matter?? Should we celebrate Burnham’s splitting of the unified national movement just to satisfy his megalomania – and then leave us so divided after independence that we still haven’t come together 57 years later??
And then there’s the matter of the date chosen for independence – May 26. Why celebrate the day in which the first ethnic cleansing operation in the hemisphere was executed by the PNC at Wismar – and left the Indian- Guyanese majority of the populace traumatised?? Didn’t that dastardly act ensure that, while independence gave us a state, we still haven’t become a nation?? Our independence was like that poisoned tree lawyers talk about – the fruit of which inevitably also becomes poisoned. Fiddled electoral arrangements to install the PNC in Government?? So, didn’t Burnham likewise fiddle around electorally for the next twenty-eight years to remain in office – and the ex-colonials couldn’t tell him anything??
Independence was supposed to deliver economic prosperity, since the exploiters were now gone. So, what happened?? Economic ruination happened, that’s what!! The rice industry was destroyed to spite the PNC’s political opponents – Guyanese-Indians who supported the PPP. The sugar industry was raped by a levy that scooped off the profits, so that the mainly Guyanese-Indian workers couldn’t get their legally mandated share. Ironically, even the bauxite industry – which employed the PNC’s African-Guyanese supporters – was destroyed, since they insisted on employing their unqualified “own”!! Karma’s a bitch!! By 1989, we were certified as the second most poverty-stricken country in the hemisphere – hovering precariously above Haiti!
Your Eyewitness dares anyone to tell him what positive element there was in Independence. The flag, anthem and motto?? The last just mocks us, since we’re certainly neither a nation nor a people – just a common destiny of destitution.
So, your Eyewitness has been in mourning, not just on this “Independence Day”!
…on Mahdia
So, what have we learnt from the Mahdia horror?? That, for one, there are some among us who don’t know “time and place” on account of their hatred of the PPP Government. How in God’s Name can these people talk about blaming the Government for the action of a clearly disturbed young girl?? So, the Government’s to blame for the fella in Chesney who murdered his wife of 30 years and buried her in a shallow grave??
Then there’s all the expressions of sorrow across the land – and even in “foreign”. Forget about doing anything for the survivors or the parents of the girls who perished. Will all these mourners make any changes in their own home that are all encased in steel grills?? Truth of the matter is that grills became a part of our lives because of the crime invasions since the eighties. Make Guyana safe again, and grills will be gone!!
As for Mahdia, let us mourn for ourselves as much as them.
…Local Government Elections
The upcoming June 12 LGE’s gonna push the Mahdia Horror off the front pages, and we’ll be back to the political tits-for-tats. The only question is how many of the PNC’s strongholds the PPP’s gonna capture!!
