A land of many reforms, but leading to where?
Kaieteur News – Guyana has long been famous for being a country of many waters. Today, it would be more accurate to identify it as the land of many reforms. The land is well watered with the sounds of singing, noble visions, inspirational scenes, all part of the emerging story of electoral reform. We need it as a cure for cancer, coronavirus, and all those other chronic illnesses known to man, and tormenting its existence. So the EU comes to this dusty, sun-baked border called Guyana, and in the hands of its people it’s something about ‘electoral reform, the ravages of its recommendations.’
We welcome the people of the EU and the product of their long experiences and profound thoughts. What he puts on the table is practical and relevant, and so much that is meaningful to the people of this country. We thank them for their efforts and interests, their offers of help so that we can help ourselves. To emerge from the sleazy racial uterus. To come off the shaky social realm. To rise above the slim political environment. Reach for a higher and better national lifestyle. Whatever the EU delegation brings before us, and places before our leaders, we can only thank them sincerely, because its members and its work product are relentlessly tackling and struggling to helps us get off our knees. They do so by revealing to us that there is a better way to get around these things, seasons and customs called elections in Guyana.
The EU, CARICOM, the OAS, and the US have done their bit to show us some light, a potential keyhole view toward a fulsome future. However, do we really want to do that and be there, deep within our sordid spirit and our sick souls? We’ve had expert documentation and guidance before, but those have led us nowhere, and somehow always seem to bring us back to the one where we started from. From where we started, in some determined way, as an individual, as a tribe, as a collection of tribes, and as a nation made up of those hostile and distorted tribes.
Outsiders can come here for the rest of their lives holding our hands and clearing our heads. They can offer the best of medicines and wavelengths with the best prospects of improving our social shoes and our woes. They can come with the best intentions to point the way forward for us, even lead us part way. But, in this paper we ask this again: do we want to do it and be that way? To go where the provisions and recommendations of such electoral reform can take us?
The foreigners can only take us so far. After that, we have to dig deep and find ourselves to the widest possible expanse that we have what it takes to take the first baby steps to carry us the rest of the way. So far, in the still young life of this nation, we have manifested a remarkable reluctance to venture into that first fresh red of possible reform and renewal; of the revival that comes from revitalization, which, who knows, could lead to some shape through some slipping, of recovery.
It has now come to light in all its deep detail, those EU recommendations that could lead to genuine electoral reforms, if we are serious about having such a thing. What is presented to us as fundamentals and essentials, has certain things that they must be. Not just in paper form, and not from the oaths of conveniently and deliberately deceitful men, who are already busy figuring out ways to get around them. But as to what we must do if we are ever going to have the kind of quality elections that closes out with authority, credibility and finality in a day, and peacefully powers everything from ‘ For the next five years.
No one needs to educate us about how we have to manage the press, and how the media – public and private – should be configured at a structural level, or how it must be practices follow some minimum standards, but there we are. (again). Because social media occupies such a vast space, and a largely un disciplined crowd, that is a more challenging pressure cooker for policing and oversight purposes (but something has to be done about those media and platforms). At the beginning and end of it all, it depends on what is invoked and demanded by leaders (if they want to) for followers to embrace. And on the pain of anger and dismissal and downfall of those who ignore or break.
The same is where the money poured into our elections, the last one being cake and icing, has to flow through the best filters, with limits and disclosures, and laws and procedures to ensure compliance. Neither the EU nor the Interpol nor the DEA need to tell us that a certain kind of cash kills democracy, is a corrupting leader of corruption, a link for more corrupt practices, and contributes to a corrupt kind of life, that of the most modest kind.
Certainly, we need many key procedural and operational steps, and every step before us, on how to prepare for elections, how to condition our citizens’ factions, how to manage the integrity of the actual process on count day. Believe it or not, we may need some oversight and some preventive assumptions on the vote count themselves. I would agree to that, and welcome any electoral reform recommendation in such critical areas.
But the EU, perhaps at risk of sacrilege or blasphemy of the gods themselves, cannot teach us how to trust one another. Or how to trust ourselves, or work hard to relate to electoral integrity. We must have, and in unprecedented torrents, the indefinability in leadership principles (not how to undercut with subtlety and violence); the best in citizen responsibility (without resorting to the fatal comforts of racial animations); and the sublime that comes from hearing the stirring calls for true nationhood (and not from self-fulfilling ambitions in the same wretched saturated strain). That is what we must do, we must do it.
Let this be said loud and clear: we welcome the EU, and whoever else comes with electoral reforms. What we are going to do with what we are given will then confirm one of two things: we are seriously and truly prepared to reform ourselves and our processes and practices. Or we’re ready to play more self-destructive games still. The EU cannot help us there. We are responsible for some essential things, and only we can do them. We must. In our long forgotten past, we can all rightly say Guyanese: “My conscience has a thousand tongues – and every story condemns me for a villain.” We come from and from Richard III where elections have been in question.
In the arrival and awakening of the EU, all Guyanese should listen and learn from Napoleon: my conscience is the tribunal, which judges me. We must make that a mantra and to the fullest extent possible.