WALKING among us, are some folks who want us to forget and never ever even mention those demoralising days when our nation suffered enormous socio-economic devastation.Why is it so crucially important, vitally critical, for us to keep at the back of the national mind the road we traversed as a nation? Our story remains relevant for its hardnosed life lessons. We cannot ignore the road we traversed to get where we are today. We must constantly look back, just to keep a proper perspective. To never repeat the mistakes we made in the past, we must keep an eye on the rearview mirror, even as we design the way forward and keep our focus on achieving our national potential as a thriving, fast-developing 21st century society.

History serves a purpose. History is life lessons. What happened to Guyanese when the People’s National Congress (PNC) ruled Guyana under rigged elections and grotesque experimentation with the concepts of democracy and development must never, ever gather dust, buried under the idea of “the past”.

We see severe kickback when we mention two events in this country: the decades of rigged elections, with the crippling of democratic Guyana and the socio-economic collapse of the nation’s soul; and the matter of the suspected political assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney.

The cold case of Dr. Rodney languished as a stain on the good conscience of the Guyanese nation for 34 years, and, astonishingly, we harbour among us leaders, writers, influential citizens, who want to ignore the fact that the Guyanese State may have assassinated its most scholarly citizen.
In President Ramotar convening the Rodney Commission, our nation took the step to perform necessary surgery on the psyche of our body politic. President Ramotar demonstrated his immense love for national justice and for social healing with his courageous act, showing the depth of his character, resolve and good conscience.
Yet, top military leaders and even those touting themselves as friends of Dr. Rodney and his family flatly refuse to support President Ramotar’s quest for national justice in this case.
We see the same arrogant, nasty kickback against us when we talk of the socio-economic crisis that caused the collapse of Guyana’s macro-economic and social structures and systems.
The popular cry is that we should never mention “the 28 years”, that notorious time when the Guyana Government of the PNC experimented with crucial ideas like democracy and development, twisting these terms to suit a dictatorship Government and a form of economic management that fuelled massive national corruption, the starving of our population, and gross poverty.
Why should we keep these things always at the back of our mind?
Simply because such history serves as life lessons, teaching us what could happen to us again, warning us like an SOS red flag that we must never fall into that trap again, which started with a coalition government in 1964.
But, more importantly, talking about the past shows us why we are where we are today as a nation. For the past two-plus decades, our nation had to go through a rigid repairing process, to re-align the foundation and structure of our national institutions, State agencies, legislations and governance systems to the true meaning of the values we hold dear: democracy and development.
That period of repairing, when the freely and fairly elected Government spent tens of billions of dollars to transform 1,000 public school buildings, repairing them from broken-down structures to spanking new buildings; when we had to overhaul health care centres and hospitals from their state of disrepair and falling apart into sturdy structures; when we had to deploy serious energy in fixing roads; when we had to repair the Demerara Harbour Bridge and water supply across the country, so that now we don’t see citizens lining up for potable water; when we had to cure our land of excruciating blackouts; these, and a multitude of woes citizens suffered during those dictatorship days, we’ve had to be repairing over the past two-plus decades, while still initiating new development projects like the Berbice Bridge and Marriott.
But the people who caused such immense collapse and stunning suffering upon the Guyanese nation want us to forget about what they did to us, how they caused things to fall apart, how they reduced our country to a pitiable rubble. Forget those days, they say, and let’s just look at what’s going on today.
To isolate our vision to just what’s going on today is to take ourselves outside the context that shaped our path to where we are today. Why are we only now a middle-income developing country? Simply because we had to employ that massive repairing plan, to fix all the broken stuff across the country.

The context of having to fix up a broken society is a crucial context that needs our constant consideration.

We cannot just ignore, for example, Mayor Hamilton Green’s decades in Government, in considering his poor Mayorship of the Georgetown City Council. This one leader impacted so much of our history, yet many would prefer we leave his story untold, and just ignore what his leadership hoisted upon us.

We cannot ignore the military leaders who played a role in Dr. Rodney’s demise, who obeyed State orders under the PNC to hijack ballot boxes and steal our votes, who want us to forget their crimes against our soul and their unethical behaviour and their moral rectitude.
The Guyanese story comes within the context of the suspected political assassination of Dr. Rodney, as this event impacted our nation and its destiny. The Guyanese story wraps around the context of those 28 years of rigged elections and banned basic food and denial of freedom of expression and freedom of movement. The Guyanese story is contextual, and for us to ignore that context would be awfully silly of us.
We understand the motive of those who campaign to convince young people and the nation that “those 28 years” and the demise of Dr. Rodney are events we should forget: who wants their wicked sins and their dark soul exposed?
But we must consider the overall public good of the Guyanese nation.
And that public good calls for profound reflection and constant consideration of our full historical context, the entirety of our evolving story.
Whoever shows up as the bad guys who crippled the Guyanese body politic and wounded us so badly must face the legacy of their wickedness, in that their role in dragging us so far down, to rank with Haiti as the worst-off nation in the Americas, must remain a warning to our future generations: never again must we sacrifice our potential at the altar of despotic leaders who want us to forget what they did to us.

by Shaun Michael Samaroo