ONE crucial impact of the historical political schism that harms our nation sees us holding opposing, hostile viewpoints, causing us to see each other as enemy.

And, as the natural stance of enemies facing off against each other, one side acts as the hostile provocateur. Which side is it that causes this perpetual rift in the Guyanese society? Which side refuses to apply the healing balm of mutual understanding and respect, of cooperation and collaboration?
It behooves us to consider these questions as we prepare to progress the Guyanese nation into a full-fledged 21st century society. We cannot propel ourselves to our potential unless we heal ourselves of our historical woundedness.
We define such important ideas like democracy, freedom, development and rights from our vantage point, our viewpoint, and too often refuse to consider the “other” side’s point of view.
With the split in the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in the 1950s, we saw a wall wedged into our national consciousness, which today acts as our default way of seeing the world. We peer suspiciously over the wall at each other, focused not on the big picture of the Guyanese Dream, but on how to keep the other side down.
So we harbour among us discontents who set out to stifle the Amaila Hydro project, and the expansion of the international airport, and all the big projects we take on and dream of and determine to build. Even the Marriott, which put us on the international map, took a nasty tongue-lashing from these disgruntled souls, who see development as a bad thing, just because the PPP proposes it.
The constituents of the breakaway political party in the 1950s, the People’s National Congress (PNC), caused a re-shaping of how some sections of Guyanese see our nation, and in fact this party radically experimented with the terms democracy, development, freedom and rights for close to three decades.
Today, the PPP governs our society with its own viewpoint of what we mean with the terms democracy, development, freedom and rights. The PPP insists that Guyana is a democratic nation, fully free and open. The Opposition disagrees, and, astonishingly, sympathisers of the Opposition viewpoint lobbied the US Congress claiming that Guyana is “dictatorial”.
The PPP says that Guyana today harbours a free and fair media atmosphere, with freedom of the press now an entrenched culture in the land, after two decades of independent media operation. But the Opposition claims Government controls the media landscape, and even some misguided private media houses claim Government is against freedom of the press.
Then there’s the talk of rights, with the Opposition claiming that Guyanese enjoy little or no rights today under this Government, even as Government and the PPP extol the rights and recourse to justice that citizens enjoy, including rights to challenge Government at the Caribbean Court of Appeal, and to challenge Government Ministers on constitutional and administrative matters.
And the term development generates such heated rows that citizens feel depressed listening to Parliamentarians talk of our nation. We see development all around us, yet Opposition leaders, with disingenuous straight faces, claim there’s no development today in Guyanese society.

So we see this schism, this awful dichotomy, bedevil our nation, whereby the two sides face each other using the same words, but meaning thoroughly different things.
It takes the neutral, clear mind, untainted of the irrational and unreasonable, to consider these terms in relation to Guyana today.
Those who try to assert that we’re a dictatorship, and that we lack democratic functions, speak with generalised anger, never zeroing on specifics. They use anomalies like the delay in local government elections to scream at the top of their lungs that all Guyana is dictatorial, refusing to consider the fact that the system for local government elections needed major reform for it to effectively work.
We see the impact of the warped local government system with the demise of our capital city, Georgetown, over the past two decades. Mayor Hamilton Green won the Mayor’s seat in the last local government elections, and the maladministration, mismanagement and gross inefficiency that emanated from that Mayor and City Council caused the literal collapse of City Hall, and Georgetown.
Yet, instead of our nation working through a national conversation on what went wrong and how to repair the system, discontents wildly scream irrationalities and unreasonableness, claiming Guyana is not a democracy.
Incredibly, though, the same people who condemn Guyana today with this wild juvenile rant of bandying around the word dictatorship without context or rational meaning, just irrational tantrum, these same people applauded when Opposition folks acted to terminate two freely and fairly elected Guyanese Governments, within the last ten years.
As in the days of rigged elections, these folks stubbornly ignore the voice of the Guyanese people, the free and fair voting of Guyanese citizens, and moved to end the Governments of late President Janet Jagan, and current President, Donald Ramotar.
Such grotesque misapprehension of the term democracy leaves one flabbergasted, and the only explanation one could settle on is that the proponents of the dictatorship word are blind to their own folly, unable to grasp their own foolishness.
But their understanding of these crucial terms – development, democracy, freedom, rights – impacts every single Guyanese citizen.
We saw with the PNC experimentations with our social, economic and political systems from 1964 to 1992 how the misunderstanding of those terms could cripple our nation. So devastated and broken we became that for the past quarter century we’ve been repairing fundamental structural damage to our society.
At the end of the day, what matters is one’s worldview, how we understand the terms and ideas and concepts that we employ in our rhetoric and public discourses.
So we need to fully consider, with clear minds, what we mean when we talk of development, democracy, freedom, rights, and such important ideas. How we understand these ideas, this makes our nation, for we saw how devastating the misunderstanding of these ideas could be, in that long period from 1964 to 1992. Since 1992 to now, we’ve applied a sane, sensible understanding of these ideas.
It’s crucial that we choose with care those of our leaders who hold the sensible, rational, clear meaning of these ideas to lead us, as we set out to heal that historical schism that causes us today to harbour a divided society, a division rooted in the meaning of words like democracy, development, freedom and rights.