Latest update March 29th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 03, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Irfaan Ali, the President of Guyana, is no slouch. From since his days as a Minister he had acquired a reputation as a go-getter.
He gets things done and gets them done quickly. That has been one of the features which endeared him to the Leviathan within the PPP.
Upon assuming the Presidency, he took up where he left off in 2015. He has been moving with breakneck speed to implement projects and to keep his party’s Manifesto promises.
It therefore has come as a total surprise that one of the promises which he himself made last March has not been acted upon. Last March, on the first anniversary of the 2020 general and regional elections, the President announced that he would be conferring the Order of Democracy on those individuals who helped safeguard Guyana’s electoral democracy.
This was no loose comment. It formed part of a statement which the President issued on the first anniversary of the elections of 2nd March 2020.
Recalling the attempt to thwart the will of the people, the President noted that the country experienced a dark time. He said that the shadow of autocracy and the risk of ostracism hung over the country.
He noted that Guyana only escaped that fate because brave men and women, of all races, ages and political persuasion, set aside their political differences and eschewed bigotry. They stood up to defend democracy and to resist stolen elections and autocratic and illegitimate government.
The President said that he would recognize those who took such a stand and proposed a special Order of Democracy to honor them. One year has passed and he has not done so.
How does one explain their failure on the part of the President? How does one explain something which is totally at odds with the President’s track record of getting things done?
I believe there are certain possible explanations. First, the President may have received a pushback from within his party.
The PPP has always been of the view that it is the true vanguard party of Guyana. The party’s leadership has always deluded itself that it was the PPP and the PPP, almost alone, which fought for free and fair elections.
The PPP therefore has developed a habit of underestimating and under appreciating those from outside of its ranks. It has done so to the point of negating the role played by persons outside of the party.
It is this sense of the PPP being the deliverer of Guyana that finds prominence today within the PPP. And it may have been that sentiment which has led the PPP to alienate itself from its former allies in the anti-dictatorship struggle.
It is this same sentiment that was responsible for the PPP/C only sporadically conferring national awards. The PPP views itself, its cronies and its friends as the only entities worthy of national acclaim.
This same syndrome of the historical greatness of the PPP may have boiled to the fore following announcement of the President and which has occasioned resistance to any plan to honour others from outside of the party. It is not hard to imagine those within the ranks of the PPP arguing, forcefully, that it was the PPP mainly which was responsible for thwarting the attempts to rig the 2020 elections.
But there is also, I believe, another reason why the Order of Democracy has been left to languish. The PPP knows the names of those local individuals who stood up and stood out during the five-month attempt to steal the elections.
The PPP however is not on good terms with some of those persons. And not to recognise the contributions of those persons would be too glaring an omission.
It is, for example, impossible for the PPP to ignore the efforts of persons such as Chris Ram and, Glenn Lall. The Kaieteur News took a principled editorial position that it was not entertaining any defence of rigged elections. And the paper and its sister radio station took a firm stand against the rigging.
But Glenn Lall has also taken a firm stance against what he believes has been the failure to renegotiate the oil agreement. And he has been critical of the PPP/C’s pet projects.
And so, I believe, that the government finds itself in a tangle. It cannot confer the Order of Democracy without including Ram and Lall, both of whom stood heads and tails above most others in defending the ballot.
And so the government cannot move forward on this Order of Democracy. Never mind the fact that it makes the President look bad!
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
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