H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – There is too much hate in this country

Mar 19, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News – Brother Tacuma Ogunseye spoke terribly recently.  His venue is a place held as a bastion of the fearsome; his choice of words to express pent-up fury, even more fearsome.  Immediately, the skies of Guyana sizzled with lightning, turbulence, and thunderous damnation.  The fact that I call him a brother condemns me to pariah status, an abhorred leper.  This is the Guyana of today. I must persevere with more determination, strength, some wisdom.  All are needed nationally.  If one heart is softened, one’s mind is opened to be met part of the way, then that progress is cherished.

GHK Lall

Brimstone rained upon Tacuma’s head. It would have helped for more of his own coming out and saying that he said wrong.  Notwithstanding their own outcast, second class status.  To speak is what this country desperately needs, especially against one’s own when he or she has crossed Rubicon(s) that unleashes the dreadful.

Similarly, I haven’t heard from the tribalists and supremacists who rage rightly at Tacuma saying one word against the vileness at Woodley Park, or other instances involving their own kind.  What’s holding back them?  When Tacuma went too far, the wraths were quick in coming.  Some vented with pen in the limited confines of newspapers, many more did not hold back elsewhere.  I did not directly hear what was said elsewhere. But what came to me is enough to confirm my worst fears: there is too much bottled-up hate in this country.  It is past the state of political passions, racial prejudices, and bigotries.  What is surfacing as part of our national reaction to Mr. Ogunseye’s descent was pure hate in the most unrestrained terms.  When all the people in a huge section of our divided demographic are made into the essence of evil, then what hope is there for us as a country?  Where are the restraining voices, the nursing hands?  I assert that it may be identical in the hearts of the group being vilified, since there is reflexive beholding of those standing as similarly hated enemies.

What I am absorbing (writing again) is that the raw hatreds are bigger than Burnham time, deeper than 28 years, sharper than December 2018 (plus14 months later), and grimmer than the 5 months following March 2022.  I grapple also with the President’s ‘One Guyana’ having no traction, no sanction, no subscription, no accommodation, and no participation.  AND THIS IS FROM HIS OWN PEOPLE.  Such is the intensity of the hate in this hard, unyielding society.  Never forget this: it is on both sides of the divide.  There are no innocents.

From the anonymity of telephone, or keyboard, and concealed identities (often openly), the vitriols tumble in torrents before us.  Guyana is not a country of citizens working towards visions.  Rather it is a country of crabs that infest the national body, and transform us into reciprocal tormenting and mauling.  These are some of the burning embers in the breasts that feed the passions uttered in such unmistakable terms following what emerged from Buxton and Brother Ogunseye’s lips.

Without any attempt to justify what was said by him, I heard echoes of what plagues the social environment throughout Guyana.  For there is the economics of this country at this time, and the politics held as the height of inequity.  Distribution.  Outcome.  Reactions.  Uneven and unfair and unacceptable have been said and written, but there is no pausing for thinking of any of that, the dire national implications of such governing actions. Not in the piercing manner, as he spoke and shared, but in what seeps in little beginnings and builds from low levels that gather and grow?  Have we thought about that and to where continuing on the same governance path leads inevitably?  For when there are perceptions of inequity in the sharing of the patrimony, then the doors of hell crumble since all other choices have been wrenched away.  No forces can succeed to keep tight lids on such forever.

My point should be recognized.  When a substantial segment of a population is made into losers, feel like losers, left to contemplate the lot of losers, then the wisdom (or horror) comes that there is nothing to lose.  Desperation reigns.  So, why not?  Why not take matter into one’s hands, and live or die with dignity?  When one mind reaches that state, and one’s mind arrives at that fateful terminal, then how can there not be many more willingly joining in what is now believed to be a righteous crusade against injustice?  I repeat: as poorly as he spoke, Tacuma Ogunseye spoke for many, whether agreeable, or denounceable.  And when the harrowing oral reactions flowed the hates that saturate Guyana glowed with the frightening.  There is simply too much hate here, all unmanageable.

I talk about moving towards a little mending.  This call to small healings is a crime, weakness, mischief, a rank provocation now. When we commit to the irreconcilable, then our riches impoverish.  What means the most is bashing, demonizing, keeping the other man down.  Monstrous hate is most preferred.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

• fearsome, GHK Lall, Guyana, Tacuma Ogunseye, tribalists