…for authoritarian power grab
The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly grabbed the attention of world leaders more than anything on their agenda for a helluva long time!! Threat of personal extinction will do that to you!! And this COVID-19 is personal to the max!! Boris Johnson got it…Trudeau’s wife got it…and unless you decide to blast off for the moon, pretty much all of us will get it sooner or later. We won’t all die…at most probably .5%. But that’s the catch…isn’t it? We just don’t know which one of us is out of that .5%!
It’s like playing Russian Roulette, excepting that microscopic viruses are pulling the trigger!!
Now with such a threat looming over them – talk about sanctions!! – you’d think these leaders would start focusing a bit more on the “greater good”, wouldn’t you?? Not because of any epiphany on morality, mind you, but because of good, old-fashioned, naked self-interest of the Ann Raynd school!! The “greater” the good increases their chances of survival, no?? But sadly, while that’s true for most, some leaders are seizing the opportunity presented by COVID-19 to grab more power for themselves.
Ostensibly, the accretion of power is justified as necessary to deal with the COVOD-19 threat. It is a trite observation that during times of catastrophe and disaster, there’s a need for swift and directed action. You really can’t engage in too much Hamlet-like soliloquies on “to respond or not to respond; that is the question”! Most folks understand this, and will go along. And that’s where the tyrants-in-waiting will seize the moment to serve their own political ends!!
Remember the “war on drugs”?? The “war on terrorism”? Well, this “war on COVID-19” is gonna be bigger and better for men on horseback, who’ll ensure that after the war, they cannot be challenged. And this is the double-barrelled clear and present danger that confronts us in Guyana today: there’s not only a threat to our health, but an existential threat to our democracy!!
In China, Egypt, Turkey, Russia etc, we’re seeing the consolidation of power regimes that won’t go away with the crisis. In Algeria, for instance, protests for democratic reforms that have been going on for a year have now been halted. And it’s against this background that we must consider this caretaker PNC-regime’s moves: those “burn and destroy” and “detain at will” edicts, for instance.
The COVID-19 crisis, of course, caught us smack in the middle of the PNC flagrantly and blatantly trying to rig itself back into power in front of the whole world. If they could do that without a pandemic, the mind boggles at what’s ahead.
You don’t need firestick to see in broad daylight! Burnham’s legacy in spades!!
…to understand GECOM
There’s a whole lotta folks who see building new institutions of governance as the silver bullet for what ails our body politic. But your Eyewitness doesn’t set too much store on institutions – seen as rules for effectuating some value or other. Take GECOM. And, as the late great Rodney Dangerfield would quip, “Please!!”
GECOM was organised between 1992 and 2000 to fix the rigging of elections we’d had under Burnham and the PNC during the previous 3 decades. All sorts of rules were excruciatingly set up and legislated: autonomy, separate budget, choosing a Chair, counting at the place of poll etc, etc. But have all of these institutional rules delivered for us free and fair elections?? Just look around!
And what this shows beyond a shadow of doubt is that where there aren’t the necessary moral and cultural consciousness in the PEOPLE who man ORGANISATIONS, the outcome will remain the same ole, same ole.
In Guyana, we still don’t have a class that puts the state before their group.
…for more graft
And we arrive at the institution that’s supposed to be the panacea for our political logjam writ large: the grand coalition of all the parties in parliament.
The institution may be okay, but what about the folks in the organisation!?
