WE want to commend the main political parties for their real efforts at cultivating a national stage this elections season that inspires and motivates the Guyanese nation. Campaigning seems to be moving in the right direction. After President Donald Ramotar announced national and regional elections for May 11 next, we’re seeing a transformation of the bitter verbal feud that bedeviled the 10th Parliament.
What citizens encounter in the public space shapes how Guyanese experience their social life. In seeing and hearing positive words and images and videos, we feel warm inside, with an inspired satisfaction that we Guyanese are a progressive people, developing and moving forward.
The ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP) rolls out glittering newspaper and television advertisements focused on our achievements, successes and positive developments. We encounter these commercials feeling good, boosted with optimism, fulfilled that our Guyana holds its own in the global village, as a fast emerging 21st century society.
When the Opposition, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), issued a public statement last week cautioning one of its own senior member against negative campaigning, because she had heckled a political meeting in Linden, the Opposition had joined the ruling party to ensure we experience a peaceful, sensible, workable social space, even in the rough and tumble of regional and national elections.
With the subsuming of the Alliance For Change (AFC) in APNU, we see the Opposition touting, in their organisational name, the ideas of alliance and partnership. These words connote good, positive vibes, and stir Guyanese with hope that the days of political divides are coming to a close, after 50 years of acrimony, strife and dissent.
Since 2011, the political atmosphere became poisoned, demotivating and demoralising citizens, with Parliamentarians the main culprit in fostering a negative air over the land. So it’s refreshing to wake up now to encounter a new, fresh atmosphere as we work to rally citizens to the cause of democracy and choosing our Government through free and fair elections.
The babble of vicious words of vengeance and revenge from the AFC seems toned down these days, and APNU’s leader, Brigadier David Granger, seems determined to manage a quiet, refined, cultivated leadership of his Opposition force. We must empathise with him, as this task could not be easy: to harness the various voices within the coalition party must be a full-time job in itself. So we want to commend APNU for its signals, for showing that it’s willing to conduct a decent, calm, positive campaign.
It’s unfortunate that the Opposition doesn’t spend a lot of time talking of its vision, development projects and goals for the Guyanese people. We hear too much of vengeance politics, with words like jail, prison, corruption, and generalised wanton criticism of Government’s development projects like the Marriot constantly the subject of discussion. Guyanese are fed up of this paranoid obsession with verbal attacks on personalities within Government, with no concrete evidence to back up wild allegations and sleazy soundbites.
The negative words of folks like Carl Greenidge and Christopher Jones and others could disrupt the open, free opportunity Guyanese enjoy today to really cultivate a national stage where we discuss ideas, visions and concepts for leapfrogging Guyana firmly as an emerging global society.
We’ve come a long way since we achieved democracy in 1992, with freely and fairly elected Governments under the ruling party taking us to a positive place, after facing nearly three decades of dictatorship that caused our socio-economic devastation. The recovery process is ongoing, but it’s decidedly happening.
We’ve overcome gross poverty, solved the housing crisis that crippled Guyanese families for decades, whereby by 1990 massive ghetto squatting areas had sprouted up across communities, and realigned our macroeconomic structural integrity so that Guyanese could self-develop with ease.
The Opposition would want to admit these things, to be magnanimous, authentic and real, and show its generosity of spirit, to commend those areas where Government made real progress, and to praise the PPP for the successes it achieved over the past two and a half decades.
Guyanese don’t want to Opposition to worship Government, or to abandon its watchdog role. In fact, President Ramotar’s Government would welcome suggestions and ideas for ironing out some of the kinks we continue to encounter as a society. The President stands committed, as he’s said over and over, to a clean, progressive, collaborative and cooperative leadership culture in this nation.
We empathise with him for what he faced from the rampantly misguided 10th Parliament, which felt it held a right to dictate to the Government how the nation should be managed, thus choking off all efforts at cooperation, collaboration and consultation within Parliament.
Refusing to see that it’s Government’s prerogative on how the Amaila Hydroelectric project and the Marriot and the Specialty Hospital and the international airport got built, and how the Procurement Commission and so on function, the Opposition obsessed with opposing all and sundry, thus crippling President Ramotar’s effectiveness in these projects.
This elections season we want to see an end to that air of poisoned verbal attacks on Government and on State projects. We want to see Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo and Greenidge and Brigadier Granger and others regale us with their vision, goals and dreams for the Guyanese nation, for them to stir in our hearts a new consciousness and new insights and new ideas for how we’ll tackle the task of working together to elevate Guyana beyond the lofty heights we’ve achieved today.
The Opposition’s got a real opportunity to showcase a new national atmosphere this elections season, and Guyanese citizens would feel good about our body politic were we to hear and see and feel positive words and utterances from all leaders, both Government and Opposition.
One critical problem we face in Guyana today surrounds the national media. Our national newspapers choose to headline gore, gossip and grossness on their front pages, and TV news and social commentators indulge in insults, sleaze and slander. This generates a national atmosphere of negativity, and fuels the base emotive instincts of the population, and even of leaders. We encounter our national media landscape, and mirror or imitate what unenlightened publishers, editors and writers insist on filling our minds with, these words that appeal to our base instincts, that refuse to lift us to the noble place of a thinking nation.
But with the grotesque failure in the influential media space, the responsibility rests on the shoulders of our political leaders this elections season to ignore the rampant negativity of biased and prejudiced media practitioners, while insisting on cultivating a positive playing field.
One presupposition of Opposition leaders and those who insist on missing the point of Guyana’s development and elevated place in the world today, is this belief in fuelling a dependency syndrome in citizens.
Government creates the open, free, fair playing field whereby citizens who work hard and exercise discipline and cultivate necessary essential life skills for personal self-development, would achieve their individual dreams and visions. Stories of Guyanese rising and excelling in life abound in our nation. We’re seeing young Guyanese in political advertisements of the ruling party regale the nation with their achievements and successes.
On the other hand, we see in influential sections of the national media a constant fuelling of a dependency syndrome, this insistence that Government should magically provide a fairytale life for anybody who has a grouse or complaint. This unrealistic expectation fuels a national stage of unworkable negativity.
In this elections season, our politicians must exercise a responsible attitude towards owning the social space with their words, seeking to motivate, inspire and lift the spirits of citizens, seeking to build a national social space that hums with positive vibes and harmonious magnanimity.
Leading the way in this, the PPP’s official campaign has got off on the right foot, and the APNU party seems to be following suit, signalling an image of positive peacefulness, though we want to hear visions, ideas and developmental concepts in the public speeches of its leaders.

Stories of Guyanese rising and excelling in life abound in our nation. We’re seeing young Guyanese in political advertisements of the ruling party regale the nation with their achievements and successes.
On the other hand, we see in influential sections of the national media a constant fuelling of a dependency syndrome, this insistence that Government should magically provide a fairytale life for anybody who has a grouse or complaint. This unrealistic expectation fuels a national stage of unworkable negativity.

By Shaun Michael Samaroo