…dividing Guyana
Now that we’re in the middle of the fifth month of the PNC’s elections heist – with no end in sight no matter what the Iron Lady rules today – we should begin to take stock of the effects of their endless “gamesmanship”, as Mia Mottley put it, on the body politic. We know that this nightmare will have to end one day and there will be the challenge to pick up the pieces of a society that has been shattered along the old lines of cleavages – and try to put them back together.
And that’s been the main effect of the gamesmanship purveyed by the propagandists over social media – divisions. Have we really reached the point to agree with Eric Phillips and conclude that partition is the only practical way out of our dilemma? Isn’t this a self-fulfilling prophesy of their own artifice?? Are these fellas comfortable with the trauma that the upheaval of families in any “exchange of populations” would cause?? We don’t have to go all the way back to the partition of India…just look at what happened in Sudan less than a decade ago. Has partition solved anything?
But what the example of the extremist partition proposal has shown is that such “options” are the result of an intensification of the politics of hate that was launched as soon as the PPP was returned to office in 1992 after 20 years of rigged elections by the PNC. That politics of hate already resulted in armed attacks on the PPP Government between 1998 and 2008 – for which, amazingly the PPP is blamed for the spike in killings that occurred during that time!! Talk about blaming the victim writ large!!
This politics of hate has been facilitated by the explosion in the availability of social media that is streamed at the speed of light to almost every man, woman, and child in the country. One is reminded of the Rwandan radio station that in the 1990s dehumanised the Tutsis as “cockroaches” and so made it easier – if not salutary – to just kill them off to solve their ethnic “problem”. Eventually, more than a million of them were hacked to death.
Now most might thing this is an extreme scenario – and it is. But the point is, it did happen and the Hutus and Tutsis are humans just like us in Guyana and separated by ethnic divisions. Here we see the same dehumanising process going on over Facebook with one agitator calling folks across the divide “trench crapaud”. What do people do with crapauds? Kill them out, of course.
We know the ERC was formed to address these ethnic warriors. But they’ve abdicated their responsibilities.
‘Cause the Chair is friends with the Sanctimonious Gangster.
…and sophistry
One of the most devious of the extremists – who doesn’t mention he’s an APNU candidate – thinks he’s very clever. He hides behind the fig leaf of “shared governance” to insist he’s being “reasonable” in dealing with our divisions. He scoffs at those who insist that since the PNC entered the elections by jettisoning their 2015 “shared governance” spiel, Guyanese must accept the results of the elections. Meaning accepting that there has to be a winner and a loser – just like in 2015!!
He justifies his call for the elections to be scrapped by pointing out that after five months the system hasn’t produced a winner!! Can you believe this?? The PNC ensured there’d be no declaration of a winner by throwing all kinds of spanners into the system starting with Mingo, Eslyn David, and now Lowenfield and they must be rewarded by not just being brought into the executive, but GRANGER MUST REMAIN PRESIDENT??!!
This is just another version of a fixed coin toss, where “heads you lose; tails I win”!!
…benefactors
When, over a year ago, your Eyewitness described Granger as a dangerous acolyte of Burnham who’d try to replicate his master’s dystopian totalitarian nightmare, some scoffed.
What say you now??
