Winner takes all system of yore makes for losers of all of us
Dear Editor,
Everybody is talking about it. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants to do what is required to start, much less to get there. That would be on the road first, and then continuing on it towards some form of national healing and reconciliation.
Last year, for seven consecutive weeks, during the throes of the noconfidence controversies and struggles, I shared almost a thousand words each week about reconciliation. Few, if any, listened. Fewer cared. Worse still, even less gave a flying, ahem, something about what I tabled. But now more and more are rushing to the fore to wax profusely about the need for some sort of reconciliation. Since this is always close to me, I cannot help but agree. But as I do so, there is recognition that the headwinds standing in opposition are ferocious.
Listen to a smattering of the thinking, some verbalized, some silent. We won. Not a bit of it; let there be no talk of anything such. Another way to power. Backdoor. I pity these, ah, characters. Sooner or later, the insensible and those imitating infants, will have to come to grips with this unyielding reality: the winner takes all system of yore, makes for losers of all of us, including those who think they won. Dis time nah lang time; cliched, but so true.
Look at us at right now. What is the dominant feature of our existence? To ask and answer, it is neither expectation nor celebration, with both held in some barely controlled check. It is fear. Fear that the other man and the other group will ascend.
People from one group or another have been told repeatedly, and in the most unconditional and confident of terms, that they have won. If they have to be reduced to the forced contentment of losing now, and all that that means, then the source of that defeat has to be dealt with in any way that removes the threat and the reality of such an obstacle, a most undesirable one.
In this most fevered of atmospheres and environments, most do not have time nor patience with clean process nor priority for clean governance. Does not matter. Could care less. Just declare us the winner. In this boiling cauldron, I am at a loss to understand how anyone, any group, could think that they stand a chance
to rule efficiently and smoothly. Inclusive government is out, and any such messengers run the risk of being lined up for summary dismissal. Similarly, trusting the next man and the next side to do the right thing and immediately be open to reaching out to embrace the opposite people for some form of inclusion and reconciliation is off the table and out the window.
This is what is at play under the surface currently, and for the longest while now. Still, there are those who clamour about winning and ruling happily ever after, as if this is just like old times. It is not; dis time nah lang time. I go back to where I have always been: too much hate. Too much stubbornness. Too much selfishness. Too much lusting for power.
After all this, I hear stirrings of reconciliation through immediate reaching out past declaration and swearing in which appear to be the most insurmountable of mountains. I regret that the time for that may have passed us by. Dis time nah lang time.
Yours faithfully, GHK Lall