Our people need to stop being passive

Dear Editor,

The country has predictably been set into uproar because of the decision made by Alliance For Change Parliamentarian Charrandas Persaud to side with the opposition in bringing a no confidence motion against the Government of Guyana. There is nothing much to say about the circumstances and motivations behind Mr. Persaud’s position except that they are not anomalous to the poisoned environment that is our national political arena.

Now we are faced with – a year and a half ahead of schedule – the most significant national elections in our post-independence history and all the potential harm they hold for the stability of our country.

There is the African proverb that is often quoted in relation to our political system, the one that says, “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers”. And yes, it is true, that whenever political behemoths clash, it is often the people beneath them that are trampled upon. But elephants do not survive, they cannot survive, without succour from the grass itself. It is always the grass that is essential, that fuels the very conflict that kills it. Our people need to stop being passive, we need to stop acting as if we are mere grass.

Of course, I know it is a difficult proposal for people to be expected to change their fundamental concept of how the social contract works. The country we expect and we deserve is not some promised land of plenty that we stumble upon travelling the same path we have travelled for the past sixty years. Citizenship requires a protected space in which there is sustained and dedicated cultivation and this is where a certain quantum of people come in, those who have expressed an interest in meaningful and lasting peace and stability based not on partisan hegemony but on the creation of civic structures that are the basis of a society based fundamentally and primarily on inclusiveness and the celebration of our diversity.

Those who mean well have so far been too disillusioned to offer sustained inputs, or to come together in any structured way to ensure that their inputs can have a lasting impact. What we have had so far is people who have made their contributions in silos, and seeing no tangible change, retreated. One might as well put random raw ingredients before a child and expect them to make themselves a meal and give up on them when they do not. It is time that a quantum of people with the requisite skills and genuine commitment to this country come together around a fundamental set of core principles – equity, transparency, diversity, rule of law, civic capacity – as well as a concrete plan for the implementation of measures towards those principles. Anything else is a recipe for the continued disaster and dysfunction that we’re plagued by.

The current chaos therefore is both opportunity for and challenge to those who can contribute to a transformed society to do so, our young people in particular. There is nothing that binds the generations of the future to the sins of the past. Next year the next chapter of our history begins – my hope that it is on a different page.

Yours faithfully, Ruel Johnson