By Earl Bousquet
But the latest reports of political violence in the region’s biggest state must be seen in historical circumstances -and from a regional and international perspective. in a new era of politics globally.
It’s generally accepted worldwide that opposition parties with no chance of winning elections will pray and hope for ‘something to happen’ to change their luck – be it a natural calamity, an untimely death or a mis-statement by a ruling party person.
In Trinidad & Tobago, the opposition didn’t have to hope or pray for anything because the writing was on the wall from the day PM Dr Keith Rowley resigned and set the stage for a General Election the ruling PNM surely regretted calling ‘before time’.
In Guyana, however, it would appear that the major opposition parties are glad to benefit from the unjustified incidents of violence and unrest that have led the Government to impose a curfew.
With presidential and parliamentary elections due there this year and all indications it would take more than a miracle for the opposition to win, up came the death of an 11-year-old girl in a hotel swimming pool -enough to provide the spark that ignited a flame of violent organized reaction.
The hotel where the girl’s body was found was burnt by arson, even before an investigation started. Even before the child’s parents spoke publicly, the organized protests were announced for strategic locations, including highways and outside Police Headquarters in Georgetown.
The parents demanded -and got- an autopsy done by ‘foreign’ doctors, who all concluded she died by drowning. But that wasn’t enough for those behind the violent protests not to behave in ways that led to arrests on terror and public safety charges.
The major opposition parties haven’t supported the acts of violence, but haven’t condemned them either, while the Chamber of Commerce and other entities and persons whose properties and vehicles have been attacked and robbed, set afire and targeted by the ‘protesters’, rightfully condemned the actions.
In a nation where violence always precedes elections when one of the two major parties seems sure to win, it will always be difficult for such an unfortunate incident not to be politicized for partisan advantage, even (or especially) if only to distract from the immediate pre-election reality.
Opposition politicians in electoral binds do invent crude ways to take advantage of any and every opportunity to laughingly predict victory from the jaws of defeat.
In Guyana, the major opposition party is reportedly claiming the government and ruling party are behind the violent acts of terror that have been unleashed ahead of an election with results looming large in one direction.
The disunited opposition is unable to agree on whether to have a joint candidate, so its leader is being quoted as making the absurd-sounding claim that the government unleashed terror on the population to make itself look bad. But that’s how opposition parties in political stress and electoral distress behave everywhere.
In Saint Lucia, for example, where the ruling party’s campaign colour is red and the major opposition party’s is yellow, a perennial political loser on the opposition side has laughingly predicted that his party will win the next general elections because Trinidad & Tobago voters voted to paint the twin-island republic yellow.
Another loud Saint Lucian opposition spokesman (this time a deputy party leader) also ridiculously criticized as “shameful” and “ridiculous” a government decision to allocate a quarter-of-a-million dollars to the Ministry of Education for schools to provide sanitary napkins for students in need.
No sane mind can support such terrible opposition statements and such distasteful behaviour ought not to be accepted as new political ‘norms’. Likewise, such backward actions ought not to be simply dismissed by the Caribbean’s progressive political forces as part of any exercise of ‘free speech’ or ‘freedom of expression’.
Fortunately, though, as Saint Lucia has shown repeatedly since 1997 and Trinidad & Tobago showed on April 28, Caribbean voters can distinguish between parties of the same type in office and opposition and are capable of deciding which to give second chances, or to reject outright.
Saint Lucian voters repeatedly demonstrated, since 2006, a mysterious ability to rotate parties in a revolving-door approach to government at every General Election, inexplicably returning the same (11-6) result three consecutive times -until they decided to give the opposition an overwhelming 13-4 result in 2021 that quickly metamorphosed into 15-2 (more than a two-thirds majority) in the fourth repeated rotation.
No electorate votes out a government that shows it cares -and Guyanese are no different, so it’ll be ill-advised to think that every voter’s political choice on Polling Day will be driven only by race, religion and culture.
Factually, even the small Oil and Gas revenues for Guyana negotiated by the present opposition (while in office) has been enough for the current government to show its willingness to ensure benefits reach Guyanese -and (understandably) to the opposition parties’ collective pre-election disadvantage.
With increasing numbers of traditional opposition supporters throwing their support behind the ruling alliance in Guyana today, some who’ve been dreaming of, wishing and praying for, any type of ‘regime change’ in 2025, have been using the unfortunate pre-teen’s death to hit-the-road hard with scorched-earth terror tactics.
But Guyanese were never stupid and nary-so in these times when their nation is best-placed to continue to positively change the Caribbean region’s current and future economic performance and shared development possibilities.
The latest round of violence will be defeated by the security forces and the sensible majority who’ll naturally (again) vote against those who tend to resort to violence and will even hijack the state when they can’t win elections or influence results. Yes, it’s just a matter of time…
