OPINION: Dialogue: to lift, to give a boost, to inspire Guyanese

Last Updated on Thursday, 27 August 2026, 7:41 by Denis Chabrol

By GHK Lall

It’s a year later.  Well, almost.  Dialogue has begun.  Though belated, it’s a start.  Slow.  Unsteady.  A start, nonetheless.  APNU-PNC and WIN.  Instead of asking, what took so long, I compress.  Get going.  Forget about democracy momentarily.  It’s about duty to the trusting.  They voted for green or blue, and their voices, visions, interests have suffered.  Because men play politics.  Scan the coastline.  Hope for an opening.  What I don’t know.  The people said this is where we are.  It is past the time to bow before it.

I recall Dr. Cheddi Jagan.  It’s strenuous to recall the last time, if ever, that a Leader of the Opposition (LOO) has been treated so dismally.  By the government.  By the Americans.  By his own people in the same area of the trenches as himself.  I hear the reasons: misgivings, an abundance of caution.  I harbor some.  But my hand wasn’t raised before the people, with an appeal: nominate me, elect me.  Those who did need to yield to their own words.  Honour the will of the people.  Opportunity for rebound now looks remoter by the day.  What the PNC hoped for, the PPP now fears.  Time catches up.  Exposures reveal a Guyana that was a public secret, except for the supporting details.  From September 2025 to September 2026 (spotted myself a week), there was wrangling over GECOM seats.  A rather shabby affair, I think.  Who is representing whom and what and to what end?  None should need a constitution, bylaws, procedures to arrive quickly at that place of compulsion -it’s better than I/we go.  Two out of three could have been negotiated, managed, accepted.  Now there’s dissent over Local Govt Commission composition.  Duh fuh duh nah obeah.  It may not be democracy.  But it introduced dialogue.

Meet, greet, seat, and work to reduce the heat.  Settle feet.  Set mind.  How does this serve or not serve the people?  The government?  The larger country with all of its broader constituents?  If there’s no dialogue, then there can be no talking about democratic ideals and processes.  Even I know so.  If there is no baseline standard for stepping aside and clearing the way for newcomers to advance, then what is this all about?  Self-love?  Self-service?  Self-promotion?  To lifetime appointments.

Reverse the clock for a second.  A GECOM barter could have paved the way, then opened the door, to a Local Govt compromise.  Perhaps, I am naïve, shortsighted.  But in a country so acrimoniously and venomously powered, silence and distance amount to a tsunami of self-destruction.  Oftentimes, I am tempted to test Trump America (now racist and demagogic), to separate from this dark, vulgar, place.  Where is the upside in such circumstances, in such a raw environment?  When men who aspired to leadership, then attained it, manifest that they are not up to the peculiar challenges posed by new developments?  What wound is closed?  What sores strapped and stopped from oozing some more?  What space for a shredded, stricken polity to extract itself from the swamp, and advance one step?  More buildings will go up.  Roads widened and lengthened.  But wide swaths of Guyana and Guyanese are still fastened where they always were.  Premedieval.  This is worst way for a country, a population, to greet its newly arrived Oil Age.

There’s willingness to concede I’m wrong.  The invitation is to be set right.  Better still, set the Guyanese people right.  There’s another strand to this torrid affair of opposition not meeting opposition.  There’s the government, a president, who lacks the initiative, misses the energy, is devoid of the wisdom to extend a hand to the LOO.  Insecurity or inability?  Now there’s a loaded question.  Yet, the president talks up One Guyana and unity.  With whom and how?  By whose measurement?  I discern the sickness, ugliness, of 2020 extending to 2030.

There’s certainty that there are better ways.  The tragedy is that they are never tried.  It is why the Americans are in the ascendancy here.  When the head-of-state cannot extend basic courtesies to the LOO, other opposition blocs don’t have to imitate.  Yes, he has his heavy baggage.  A hundred thousand Guyanese said it doesn’t matter.  Their voices must matter.  Their will obeyed.  When there can be no meeting, greeting, and seating, there will only be flaring and heating up.  There will only be Guyanese tearing each other apart.  Then incinerating the fragments.  My last call: Let there be an early statement attesting otherwise.