The theatre of protest and the death of reason

Apr 14, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- The recent deaths of two young men in Linden demand investigation and truth. But they also beg us to reflect on a proclivity that has, for too long, escaped serious interrogation: the perverse glorification of protest as chaos, and the accompanying devaluation of law, order, and public infrastructure.

The deaths of these young men last week led to an escalation of tensions in the mining town. It is for the Commission of Inquiry to investigate and determine how and why they met their deaths. However, it is more than likely that its findings will be met as such findings often are, with partisan interpretations.

What is now recurring in our republic is not about the moral righteousness of the cause of the protest. Protests in Guyana are increasingly mutating towards the willful paralysis of a country’s vital arteries — its roads, its bridges — under the guise of agitation. When roads are blocked and bridges burned, the first victim is the idea of society as a cooperative compact. Protest, once the solemn register of dissent, has become an expression of vengeance. The State becomes an abstract enemy, and so too does everything that belongs to all of us: the road that carries the ambulance, the bridge that connects livelihoods, the lamp post that lights a child’s way home.

The Wismar-Mackenzie Bridge, bloodstained thirteen years ago, has again become the site of civil disobedience. In 2012, protests against electricity tariffs turned fatal when demonstrators blocked the bridge and threw missiles at the police who were seeking to clear this vital artery.

Now again, that bridge becomes the focal point of misguided rage, a literal bottleneck of thought and action. If history repeats first as tragedy, then as farce, Guyana seems to be mastering both at once.

The lessons of 2012 were not learned. The COI that followed warned plainly that those who had the influence to stop the illegal blockade did nothing. They watched as laws were bent and eventually broken. “Two wrongs do not make a right,” the report seemed to whisper into a void, while the polity promptly moved on to the next outrage. Today, the same playbook has been dusted off.

Last week, the situation threatened to get out of hand. Fires were again set on the Wismar-Mackenzie bridge. And into this melee stepped, of all people, the publisher of a newspaper — not a politician, not a peace negotiator, but Glenn Lall, a man routinely vilified by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo. Lall strode into the embers of that protest and told the people that burning your own bridge is not protest — it is self-sabotage. It is, he said, like burning the stairway to your own home. The protestors agreed, and the mood cooled.

Had he not been there, the damage to public property would have been worse. But we must ask why our numerous political leaders weren’t there seeking to calm the situation and restore reason. It took a brave man to go into that crowd to do what Lall did. Glenn Lall, who many regard as a thorn in the establishment’s side, proved more statesmanlike than the very men who sit in plushest chairs.

Video images surfaced on social media of a specific confrontation between the protestors and the police. The latter were beating a hasty and desperate retreat, pummeled by bricks. The protestors got within touching distance of the ranks seeking refuge behind anti-riot shields. These ranks could have been seriously injured, so close were the attackers to them. Perhaps some were injured.

It is to the credit of those ranks that they exercised restraint and did not use lethal force in that episode where they were seen backpedaling to escape. Given how close they were to possible death, these ranks would have been justified in exercising self-defence.  The police, it should be said, could have responded with lethal force in defense of their lives. That they did not, in that episode, should count for something in a country too quick to vilify the uniform and too slow to obey its lawful commands.

But there were other videos shown on social media where shots were heard. It is for the COI to look at all this evidence and determine who fired and what was fired and whether any force used was excessive.

Public protest has become depressingly predictable. Protestors block roadways, start fires and stone officers. The police often fumble their response. Someone gets hurt, often fatally. And then comes the long tail of outrage — the speeches, the vigils, the commissions, the calls for justice. But the cycle continues because we no longer know how to draw a line between protest and sabotage, between speech and violence, between grievance and vendetta.

We must also teach our citizens that if the police want to question you, the answer is not to run or to hide. We must teach our protestors that the right to dissent is not the right to destroy. And we must teach our politicians that leadership requires presence, not just press statements. Until then, we are doomed to replay this spectacle of self-destruction that leads to a victory for no one.

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

---

---