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Oct 20, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
You ask any first-year university student in political studies what happens as a dictatorship grows older and that student, from reading the seminal texts on the subject, will tell you that fascist tendencies emerge and the iron grip on society gets tighter and tighter.
That student will explain to you that as the dictator takes excessive latitude in one area, it will spread to other dimensions of society. Dictatorship is like a cancer. It journeys from one body part to another devouring the human anatomy.
This writer has explained countless times that as the ruling cabal secures immunity from one set of violations, without opposition protest, it will move into another series of damnations. We have reached the point where the people in Freedom House are now prepared to vitiate the electoral system.
Where are the business people who showered immense praise on Robert Corbin for banishing Macbeth’s witches after he extinguished “mo fyaah/slo fyaah?” What did the opposition get in return for the exile of Macbeth’s witches? What is the business community going to say now that we have entered a period of uncertainty?
From the time the PPP won the 2006 elections, the Government was prepared to test the water on the deepening of its fascist culture. As it skipped from one nastiness to another and got away with it, it got bolder. As it survived the Roger Khan trial and the Ramsammy culpability, its resolve to do what it wanted lengthened over the nation.
From the fake presidential marriage to the Lindo Creek massacre to the illegal transfer of concessions to certain business people who were friends of the Leviathan, the Government of Guyana was on a violent rampage that met with no resistance. Guyanese grew up with an old saying that has been passed on from generation to generation. How many times we heard our parents and older siblings say it – “give him an inch, he will take a yard.”
The PPP and the Office of the President have taken more than a yard, more than a mile, more than a county. They have taken Guyana to do what they want with it. Now the election is there for the taking.
Where are the voices in support of Mr. Corbin that argued that after President Hoyte’s death, Mr. Corbin steered the PNC away from turbulent waters and should be given recognition for that? What happens now that the 2011 elections may not take place? Is the business community still afraid of “mo fyaah/slo fyaah?”
If there are signs of agitation and turmoil to come, what role is the business community prepared to play to prevent instability? More importantly, after the attack on GECOM this week, will the parliamentary opposition still enter Parliament?
Any leader in the opposition who is prepared to re-enter Parliament after the deliberate act of weakening the capacity of GECOM by the Office of the President should be called upon to resign. No one in this country can be that foolish to think that OP’s edict to GECOM hasn’t got conspiratorial designs.
Guyana is one of the poorest countries in the world with an extremely low level of cyberspace activity. A substantial amount of voters do not have computers. More importantly, there are lots of potential voters who are not literate. It is asinine for any citizen in this country to think that the order by OP to GECOM to put the voter education programme on GINA’s website is done within the new policy framework of advertising by the State.
This writer contends that there isn’t any country in the world, including the two cyberspace powerhouses – the US and Japan – that would prepare a voter education programme and tell its citizens to go on the government’s website for guidance.
There will be television placements and full page spreads in the daily newspapers. Luncheon’s edict to GECOM is deliberate and devious.
The PPP and OP know that there isn’t even a vaguely or ambiguously written line in the Constitution that empowers the President, the Government or the police or army or any other institution, to tell GECOM how it must conduct its business.
Only one organ in Guyana can intercept an action by GECOM and that is a ruling from the judiciary based on a plea by a litigant. This writer is of the unshakeable belief that we are now witnessing the final shape of fascism in Guyana. Every citizen in this land and every Guyanese outside of it must now commit him/herself to the prevention of the national elections due next year.
GRA catch EXXON trying to hunch GUYANA over 11 BUS dollars in one shot!!!!
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