President should be more specific when he talks about inclusive governance

Dear Editor,

It is with much vagueness that the Leader of the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), President of Guyana, David Granger, for some time, has been caressing the media circuit and public events, intimating and advocating for a more inclusive kind of Government and governance but does so without providing any specific feature of this idea.

Many are of the belief that Granger’s apprehension to delve deeper into his “own” idea may be due to his inability to come to terms with his own history and that of the PNC, and understanding where it all fits into an ever-changing, ever-evolving 21st  Century reality. One may even venture to say that his reason for not expanding beyond the banner of “National Unity” and “Social Cohesion” to offer a draft of its framework or road map is, perhaps, because he cannot or does not know what it is or how to get us there.

Moreover, there is reason to suspect that the President intelligently avoids developing and conveying specificity out of fear of society rejecting such ideas not on the basis of newness, rather society’s rejection might be based on its familiarity and personal experience with the kind of divisive politics practised by his idol, Burnham, and by other PNC leaders.

Furthermore, while in Opposition, successive PNC leaders had sermonised various concepts intended to camouflage and/or accompany another agenda;  whether it be “shared governance”, “national unity”, or “social cohesion”, these are ideas that are put forward in conjunction with a kind of obstructionist adventurism and/or counterproductive campaigns against the State. Consequently, now that power has been achieved and they have successfully taken control of the State such false consciousness and mystification will in turn be employed as representing the interests of the whole of society and act as justification for any and all aggression on the Guyanese populace, including their political representatives.

In the minds of PNC’s upper echelon concepts of national unity, shared governance, and social cohesion are only servants of a conniving political agenda to secure and maintain power. It is a rebrand of Burnham’s ‘One Nation’ concept, an idea that died with its architect; an idea that failed because there was never any substantive effort to ensure its success.

Besides, Guyanese are, for the most part, a unified people, who gleefully embrace each other’s culture and aspirations of human development and financial prosperity to such a great degree that we have come to rely upon one another for the realisation of those aspirations. Therefore, it is not that we are without flaw, but to suggest that social unity and economic prosperity can be attained simply by offering lip service to murky political notions is preposterous.

Yours truly,

Cleon Maughn