This may be Guyana’s moment for truth and reconciliation

Dear Editor,

I am anticipating: the sky will not fall when the true results of voting in District (Region) 4 are declared. I do believe that the true results will eventually, inevitably be declared casting a bright light on each and every contortion leading up to and since March 02, and illuminating and discrediting our many rigged elections since 1968.

The sky would not fall but different, great burdens would be lifted from the shoulders of all of us Guyanese: supporters of the PNCR/APNU+AFC would be freed of the obligation to contort and deny the attempts to rig and subvert the results of our 2020 National and Regional Elections and many earlier ones from 1968; and supporters of the PPP/C would be freed from this and the preceding decades of apprehension, fear, worry, dread, anxiety and insecurity as times for our National and Regional Elections approached. Some say that the supporters of the PNCR/APNU+AFC face no less intent though different fears and insecurities. We Guyanese may have before us and may we seize this moment as a door which opens to truth and reconciliation.

And, I am not wearing rose tinted glasses nor inebriated with any brew. I know that our huge challenges of every sort remain unchanged, but we would be approaching them in a different context, one where any inclination to stealing elections as a “solution” would have been wholly and totally discredited. With the door to subverted electoral processes closed, doors are opened to new cordial relationships and sound development of our people and country.

We are a young nation, a Nation in the making, a work in progress. At this stage of our historical development, the fact that membership and support of our two large parties correlate strongly with ancestry/race of our peoples; the fact that the majority of Afro-Guyanese desire rule by Afro-Guyanese, and similarly, that the majority of IndoGuyanese desire rule by Indo-Guyanese, should not faze us, rather we should be surprised if it were different at this early stage in us living amongst each other.

These traditional correlations need not be so, will not be so for all time. Indeed, one can see efforts at and signs of an increasing amount of crossover, that would reduce the strong correlation between ancestry/race and political party. In the dismissals of myself, Sam Hinds, and other Afros in the PPP/C , and similarly Ms Amna Ally and other Indos in the PNCR/ APNU+AFC as window dressing and tokenism, I sense a questioning of how real is the transitioning and maturing in our politics. Actions and time will tell. One can expect even more crossovers with the exposure and rejection of rigged elections, for it has been exercising a great hindrance on our people, confusing their choices: there are significant real differences beyond race, between our two main political parties, and those differences will steadily matter more than race.

For, again, we are not a divided people but a people yet to be one, coming together out of six groups of peoples from different and distant places. There has been much closing in our nearly two hundred years of us being all together and we should celebrate that, rather than bemoaning, being frightened by and resorting to desperate actions in the face of the distances remaining for us to work at closing.

This may be Guyana’s moment for truth and reconciliation, for changed relationships between our peoples. Let us take it.

Yours faithfully,

Samuel A A Hinds

Former Prime Minister and Former President.