Fingers can be pointed in all directions
DEAR EDITOR,
Irfaan Ali’s presidency, so far, has been marked with a call for GECOM Unity and Cleanup, among other things. There are some who have joined in this call including one commissioner, who took to social media on the occasion of her swearing-in birthday. However, these calls can ring hollow and duplicate in the absence of any real initiative in order to bear fruit and even worse in the face of actions that betray the sincerity of the calls. Guyana may have been affected by ‘the same old’ politics over the years.
The call for unity is, in itself, an admission of the absence of Unity, or its fragility. Such a call must therefore be followed by stating the reason (s) for being free; and the roadmap for finding a solution. The President has explicitly referred to the ‘racial problem’. He may therefore give an opinion on the reason for dismissal. However, it has failed to accept that Guyana is not merely diverse in its constitution, as its historical evolution has provoked racist antagonisms and even hatred as evident in our social media exchanges, only to cite an obvious example . From my point of view, as an African Guyanese, my firm conviction is that African captivity and the post-slavery institutionalization of their subjugation, in Guyana, have left them economically disadvantaged and psychologically scared. This is not a platform that can be expected to answer the clear call for Unity. Simply merging under those conditions will continue their state of subjugation. If the President is serious about Unity, he must try to identify the state of all racial groups in Guyana vis-à-vis their socio-economic well-being and psychological state and find ways and means to subvert and / or facilitate the reversal. of the congestion that has afflicted each group. That may well be the platform for building Unity. No mention of infrastructure building and wealth creation will take Guyana anywhere if the historically personalized and institutionalized negative prejudices are not addressed, though a few might benefit from maintaining the status quo and build on it.
The issues affecting GECOM may well require a similar objective and humane approach, lest we point fingers forever, as Guyana sinks. For one commissioner to accuse another of being intelligent is only fostering antagonisms, not solutions. Fingers can be pointed in all directions. While the President and his bill are fingering GECOM personnel, as is the problem, there are those who finger the corrupt list, like the problem. Not to mention that the personnel were not seen as the problem when they produced fraudulent results in 2006 and 2011, an accusation, the accuracy of which has never been challenged. It can also be argued that the self-proclaimed ‘virtuous’ are those who turned a blind eye to the irrevocable evidence of the dead and absent for whom votes were cast, in 2015. In fact, they also promoted the list inflated, which became the instrument that facilitated the voting of the malicious, in 2020, for the dead and the absent.
Any sincere approach to GECOM must be zero approach where there is no piety or virtue excuse. Installation of GECOM cannot be interest driven, in that way GECOM will not be stable and Rome will burn as we fiddle.
Truly,
Vincent Alexander