Dear Editor,
The recent arrests and detention of a former Executive President of Guyana, Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary, Attorney General, other ministers, and senior member of the PPP/C – for the purported purpose of exacting justice for the Guyanese people – seem to me to be loathsome acts of persecution.
Walter Rodney, when defining power, noted: “Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one’s interests and, if necessary, to impose one’s will by any means available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines manoeuverability in bargaining, and the extent to which people survive as a physical and cultural entity”.
What is to be gained for Guyana by abusing the political power vested in you? How does this abuse of power enhance our democracy or enhance national cohesion?
There are certain actions a new or newish political administration should avoid. It is pertinent to quote Arthur J. Magida writing recently in the Washington Spectator: “America prides itself on peaceful transition from one president to the other. No coups. No backstabbing. No backward glances at what might have been… No matter how bitter a presidential campaign or how antithetical an outgoing president’s policies and ideology may be from his successor’s, the newcomer is ushered into the highest office in the land with dignity and courtesy… As part of our tradition is the absence of any remonstrance from one president toward another, regardless of the ideological gulf between them”.
To have the APNU/AFC Coalition government pursue a path, which seems to be destructive to the growth and development of Guyana – in cultural, economic, political and social ways; and in a nutshell be racially divisive, abhorrent, wholly unnecessary and persecutory – is inhumane. If the purpose is to humiliate the PPP hierarchy and weaken the PPP supporters, the coalition’s actions are an antithesis to their aims.
Persecution, as viewed by the pre-eminent legal scholar William Murray, also known as Lord Mansfield, is recorded thus: “There is nothing certainly more unreasonable, more inconsistent with the rights of human nature, more contrary to the spirit… more iniquitous to and unjust, more impolitic, than persecution”.
It seems that this administration is floating on such a sea, where priority is given to looking backwards over a horizon-less sea, as unjustifiable actions are conducted and executed with the varnish of political legality to find the invisible horizon.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French philosopher and political activist, after being arrested for civil disobedience in Paris in 1968, benefited from the intervention of, and pardon by, President Charles de Gaulle. The President said then: “You don’t arrest Voltaire”.
We may not have the likes of Voltaire, Sartre and Lord Mansfield among us. However, what we absolutely need to have is an absence of persecution by the current governing administration towards the previous governing administration. Life is too short to be wasted on seeking revenge, or conducting endless recriminative actions that torpedo our country into an ungovernable and failed state.
Party paramountcy is our country’s Achilles’ heel; it leads to perversion of justice. The heel needs to be cleansed or abandoned. In the absence of a magical river, the latter option to abandon party paramountcy in the governance of Guyana is strongly recommended.
Sincerely,
Nigel Hinds
