By Ryhaan Shah
The reaction to President David Granger’s attempt to seize Red House and evict the Cheddi Jagan Research Centre signals that there is still hope for Guyana.
Criticisms about the highhanded manner in which the move was done have come from across party and ethnic lines and signify that there is still a body of decency among the common citizenry. The thuggery and hooliganism that accompanied the revocation of the lease agreement reminded too many of us who lived through the Burnham era of that dark past; and that many are willing to state their positions fearlessly in the press, bears out that there is an active civil society who will not let Guyana return to that darkness. Not without a fight anyway and this should give Granger and the People’s National Congress (PNC) pause.
Attorney and former People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Executive Member Ralph Ramkarran branded the attempted seizure of the Red House property “the height of executive lawlessness”. This was a major component of Burnham’s style of conducting State business when party paramountcy prevailed over every facet of our lives.
Political commentator Ramon Gaskin stated that the tearing down of the Cheddi Jagan Research Centre sign took us back to “the bullysim of the PNC”.
Stabroek News’ columnist Allan Fenty in a letter to the media appraised the move by Granger as being more “political than legal” and, in another letter to the press, accountant Nigel Hinds condemned the attempted seizure and stated that the Granger Government is acting “as if we are two nations with two destinies”.
Crises can act as a consolidatory force to bring opposing sides together and the reaction to the Red House move, if the revocation was intended to test the waters, should place the Granger Government on notice that Guyanese across the board are not going to allow our country to be dragged back to a Burnhamist past.
The Burnham era was a product of the Cold War. He was kept in power because it suited America’s interests and in these international power plays it mattered little that our country was destroyed in the process. Guyana has not yet recovered from that period of executive lawlessness, mismanagement, corruption, racism and wholesale destruction because in its 23-year governance, the PPP/C made its own grave missteps and became as haughty and arrogant.
Because the PPP/C has lost the moral high ground, the current crop of PNC parliamentarians and sycophants like to use their wrongs as justification for their own wrongdoings. There is that old saying that two wrongs never make a right and it sums up the impasse that currently obtains with parties and politicians who refuse to use their good offices to lift Guyana out of its morass.
More than being an issue about the rule of law, the attempted seizure of Red House hit many of us at an emotional level and came with the realisation that if someone as heroic as Cheddi Jagan can be treated with such scant regard, there is little hope for the rest of us.
The impending closure of the historic sugar industry and the disregard for the sugar workers’ plight is a case in point; and the Burnhamist tactics used by Granger in the attempted seizure brought to the forefears about his Government’s intent to return Guyana to the darkest period of that era.
That Granger could pick up Burnham’s legacy at the point where he had accepted the failure of his policies and had reached out to Cheddi Jagan to establish a national front government.
Tragically, Burnham died before this new level of political maturity could have been realised and no subsequent leader of either party has ever revisited this idea in any of their efforts at uniting our country. Putting the failed Public Health Minister at the head of the Social Cohesion department could be viewed as a Freudian slip: even Granger himself admits that this State programme is nothing but a fraud.
Social cohesion can never be mandated by a Government that parades its racism openly. It could become a reality, however, through an organic movement from the people themselves that are driven by a common cause and an adherence to decency.
The Red House fiasco has brought with it an element of hope that we can still stand united when the cause is just. It is always the straw that breaks the camel’s back and that this can be the catalyst that will finally bring us together to settle our historical hurts and help us to move forward might be a hope too soon.
But the promise is there.
