The dance of the zombies

 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”- George Santayana  “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” – Edmund Burke

Many time on this page, I made the analogy between the success of Hitler’s domination of Germany and the ease with which Bharrat Jagdeo exceeded the autocracy of Forbes Burnham. Any honest historian would acknowledge that Hitler’s excesses were no enigma or a random act that the majority of the German people did not know about. There is no way in modern human society that Hitler could have pulled off a sadistic extirpation of millions of German citizens without some solid form of support or brazen silence from the German people. In Guyana, we were once a Caribbean pariah. Thirty years ago, many Caribbean people complained to this columnist that Guyana has too many political problems; it had bad government. Caribbean people thought that our persisting ill was that we didn’t have democracy. Lack of democracy made the world scorn us. In 1992, we were supposed to rejoin the world’s family of democratic nations. In 1999, we got Bharrat Jagdeo. Mr. Jagdeo, for reasons maybe one day a scholar will explain, got entangled in a mad rush to outshine Burnham as a maximum leader and he succeeded. But like Hitler, like Germany, the citizenry supported Jagdeo’s descent and when we didn’t, we remained reticent. We as Guyanese have not learned from epochs and ages gone by. Two great thinkers, Santayana and Burke warned us a long time ago that our selfishness will cause us to relive what we do not want to see. There isn’t a day that goes by in this country that democracy is not assaulted by our government. The signs are there to warn us, yet we contemptuously and vulgarly ignore Santayana and Burke. Not a day goes by in this country when elected institutions and elected politicians are not assaulted and humiliated by a government that ignores the pleas that came from Guyanese and Caribbean people more than thirty-five years ago that our problem is bad governance. Not a day goes by in this nation when the crass behaviour of certain stakeholders does not remind us of the era of Nazi Germany and how Hitler came to be a little god. One morning in 2011, I saw this Private Sector Commission official, who is a shameless supporter of the PPP Government, walking with his daughter in the National Park. The child was of my daughter’s age. I gazed at him and the first thing that came in my mind was the feeling of a parent. I have a young girl like his daughter and I wouldn’t want an implosion of my country to destroy her destiny. But can we learn the lessons of the past. The most barefaced among these State supporters are the organizations within the business community. Not a word has come out of the mouths of these people about the long absence of the Procurement Commission, a vital constitutional organ that can help stem the raging tide of corruption. Not a word has come from these people over the long absence of another priceless constitutional body, the Human Rights Commission. Not a word has come from these people on the refusal of the governing party to resuscitate the office of the Ombudsman. These very people are now doing the dance of the masquerade. Maybe the dance of the zombies would be a better description. The very opposition that is so disrespected by the Government and about which these private sector organizations are silent, want this very opposition to assist the Government in passing the Anti-Money Laundering Act. Since the 2011general elections which saw a victory for the opposition in Parliament, these State supporters have been concerned, shamelessly, with their profits than with the social health of Guyana. What is typical of the pathological attitude of these business folks is the crass opportunism that emanates from their souls and hearts. While calling on the opposition to assist the government with parliamentary passage of the Act, there isn’t even a faint exhortation to the Government that it has to meet the opposition in at least some of its desires that in fact originated from the people that voted for them. Don’t votes count? Are elected people voted into office so they can hold and exercise power? Where is the recognition by the governing party of the Parliament and the elected democratic councils that the opposition controls? Maybe after all, you can’t blame the profit-merchants. Money is what they seek for themselves. But they should not ask others to make their demands the nation’s priority