Dear Editor,
AN oft repeated PPP/C mantra, particularly on its television programme, “On matters of public interest” aired weekly and hosted by PPP/C’s Chief Whip Gail Teixeira on CNS Channel 6, is about “taking the country back’’, “when we take back the country in 2020”. This means, from the current coalition government.

Editor, I am a liberal and a strong proponent of the right of freedom of expression. But, concomitantly such has to be responsible and not intended to incite. The chief proponent of this daily refrain has to be reminded that any duly elected government is just the trustee of a given mandate to govern. This mandate resides in the writ of the people; it means that government is there on the authority of the people, exercising all actions for and on their behalf.

However, such does not in any way give that government the power of ownership of country, or of the citizens residing within, and in whose name it governs. In simple language, no government has a transport of ownership to the geographic space over which it governs; or a birth certificate that claims ownership of the people of that state.

Editor, this is the perennial problem with regimes such as what the PPP/C had led. Their ascension to office, with an ethnic majority vote, led it to believe that it had the monopoly of Guyana and its people in its unjust hands. Not only did it horribly distort the meaning of governance, but in its wake desecrated the nation’s laws, for its own benefit and those of its friends and cronies, in total disregard of the people. Not even its supporters’ muffled, and behind the door criticisms, meant anything to its descent into the gross venalities that became its watchword for governance.

For a drug lord who was known to have ordered the deaths of many Guyanese, claiming to have assisted the then administration to combat crime, is instructive as to the abysmally frightening, and sordid realities of such an era of PPP/C stewardship.

The PPP/C must understand, that the historical events of May 2015, have given Guyanese a re-discovered understanding of the meaning of government and in whose name it governs, particularly in a society with its ethnic cleavages as ours. All democratically elected governments are the stewards of the people. Is this so difficult for the PPP/C to accept and understand?

Regards
Earl Hamilton