Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:25 AM
Jul 07, 2015 Letters
DEAR EDITOR,
I had previously suggested that the solution to gaining control of Guyana’s national sovereignty may reside in our démarche at attempting to fight our old demons.
Maybe the answer lies in overcoming the possibility of history repeating itself by educating the people, so that they themselves may partake in the strategic orientation of the country.
Those who don’t know their own history are prone to repeating the past. Whereas the reference to Guyana’s history might make some people uncomfortable to the extent of labeling it futile rhetoric, it remains the mould that shaped Guyanese politics and shouldn’t be ignored or rewritten.
Casting history aside has caused many young Guyanese to become misinformed if not uninformed, although the role that actors play in the development of Guyana is entwined in the events which marked our country for the past 49 years.
How can one elect a government without a record, a history, and why would one choose to ignore the historical record of a government it elects?
I haven’t thrown this problematic to the reader with the intention of questioning the legitimacy of any government but rather, I wish to shed light on the important role that historical knowledge plays in the electoral process of a country.
Whether it is for an ideological cause, enhanced development, foreign, human rights, social or economic policies a party has promoted in a country, electors would remember that party’s historical record. A party campaigning for national elections with the intention of governing a country will add to its record a strategic plan for the future. One cannot be unraveled from the other.
But the 2015 elections have been the reflection of a young Guyanese generation seemingly reluctant to evoke history, because it is primarily believed to be one of ethnic cleavage. What many fail to see is that our history, however nasty it may seem, has never been Guyanese only and we were never the sole perpetrators of our own fate.
Because of this we have steered clear many times over to give ourselves and the country we uphold the proper analysis it deserves. We have overlooked our own importance in ensuring that national sovereignty is secured and we have surrendered our contribution in deciding what place Guyana holds on the international scene.
What the last elections would have proven is not that Guyana is an ethnically divided society, but rather that it is undermined by an ethnically divided electorate. The APNU/AFC coalition is in itself a vivid indication of ethnic division in the electoral base, and crusading for “Unity” and “healing the nation” is quite contradictory to its deliberate refusal of acknowledging history.
For how can one heal and unite a people who are plagued by historical demise if inspecting the cause for today’s troubles is met by reticence? How can there be “unity” if the fundamental wrongs were not corrected?
If history is the foundation of any country’s future, then what future will a Guyanese society build if it refutes its own history, and what future will it build if it refuses as a nation – a single entity – to address the past mistakes and injustices which still remain buried in the foundation of our structures of governance? Can an emerging country, without making amends with its own history, succeed in building a future and securing its rightful place in international affairs?
History cannot be corrected, but the future of the Guyanese electorate depends on how much we are willing to understand and concede that which to date still profoundly harms us, so that we may finally be able to turn the page and break those barriers which we ourselves have erected in the past, with and without the help of those who claimed to be our friends.
Should we choose to dismiss the importance of acknowledging our own history, we would find ourselves, whether willfully or not, abandoning our future to the obscure powers lurking in the shadows of our route to development. Subsequently, until we have learnt from our past experiences as a young nation, the only wrong thing about Guyanese history would be its repudiation by the Guyanese people.
De Sá
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