What is in it for you?

Oct 12, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

There are individuals who believe that they are God’s gift to Guyanese. They feel that they are the smartest thing ever to come out of this country.
They speak with the conviction of prophets while their primary interest is to profit off of the people’s misfortune.
They feel they know it all and that they have all the answers. But with each passing day what is clear is how little they know about how much they know.
These individuals masquerade as the unofficial spokespersons of the people. They always speak as if they are the champions of the suffering masses. But they are far from experiencing any suffering.
They court arrest and controversy in order to become center-stage in the news and thus appear as heroic figures in the eyes of the people. With every arrest, every protest and every picketing exercise, their standing with the people grows.
They ingratiate themselves into the hearts of the people, pretending that they genuinely care about them. But they are only interested in boosting their over-sized egos.
What exposes their falseness is that many of them do not even live in Guyana. They are absentee representatives who have cut and run. They are not going to stay and endure the same deprivations of the people; they have retreated to greener pastures where their bread is well buttered and they receive four square meals or more per day.
They do not understand what hunger means. They cannot appreciate the frustration of not being able to provide for their family. They cannot because they stand above rather than with the people. They do not experience the frustrations of the ordinary man and women. Yet they appoint themselves as the people’s saviour.
If they are so interested in the people’s plight, why don’t they come back and live like the people. They pretend to be leaders but they are virtual leaders, agitating and antagonizing from the safety of their secure homes and regular paychecks. They are not interested in the people. They are interested in themselves.
Some of them are only using the people to remain relevant. Without a camera and a microphone in front of them, they have no status and standing. If you take away their platforms, they have nothing to stand on. Without Guyanese they are nothing in their homelands. Without the controversies which they generate, they would remain political non-entities. They have achieved little in life except being social media agitators.
They have their personal agendas. Some of them have scores they wish to settle and they are using the masses to get even with those who harmed them in the past. Some of them have political and ethnic causes and want to use the people to achieve their objectives.
These masqueraders prey on the people’s fears. They do so by making the people feel that they, the people, are victims of an oppressive and repressive system which discriminates against and disenfranchising the people.
They constantly drum into the people’s heads how bad they are being treated and how much discrimination is being meted out to them. This message is repeated over and over so that after a while the people actually begin to believe it. The intention is to make people feel helpless and hopeless.
Like a child who longs for affection and support, when a person feels helpless and hopeless, they tend to become dependent on these individuals who espouse concern. This is the psychological strategy which is employed: make people feel they are victims and they will then see you as their knight in shining armour.
These political agitators have nothing to offer the people but talk. They can’t do anything for the people. They can’t provide jobs and solutions to the people’s problem. They are more interested in the axes which they wish to grind and the scores they must settle.
In the process, they do enormous damage to the psyche and self-confidence of the people. They induce the people into a state of victimhood. This breaks the people’s self-confidence and will.
They tell the people that the system is against them. But they are not interested in fixing or changing the system. They are only interested in who is in charge of the system. This is their political agenda and it is an agenda which causes them to be fixated on themes of dispossession, discrimination and deprivation.
If the people want to really expose these charlatans, they only need to ask them one question: What is in it for you?
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)