— what are you for?
UNCERTAINTY had gripped the city. Tension, like death, hung on everything, even the thin afternoon air. Everywhere was on lock-down. Election fervour. The GECOM building was a fortress; some of us had gathered on its periphery in a standoff with security forces. There was a palpable fear among us that ballot boxes would be tampered with and the triumph we yearned for out of the General Elections, votes for which were being counted, would elude our grasp.

Shots rang out punctuating our chants and in the afternoon skies our eyes followed the trajectory of the smoke and canisters. We could hear the commands to disperse. Defiant, a few of us held our noses and either kicked or threw the missiles in the other direction as they landed. But the burning of the gas would become too unbearable and we retreated along Main Street.

It was the day of Poet Martin Carter’s funeral. Life imitating art; we became the ‘faces strained and anxious’; ‘a city of clerks became a city of men.’ Our choir gathered at the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, where the poet prepared for his final walk. We had learnt that Opposition Leader Desmond Hoyte was in attendance and demanded an audience without delay. So rash we were. The quintessential statesman emerged from the parish to pacify us, walking in our raucous to Quamina Street where a vehicle took him from us shortly.

Those were the days when everything came to a standstill as we exercised our franchise and awaited for our will to be determined. In that milieu we had met a politician and presidential hopeful on the city streets, from one of the smaller parties; some of us looked up to men like him. He shook our hands, and assured us that they were ‘not going to let them steal this election’. Days later, he was a minister. Those were different times. The age of ‘hooligans’ and ‘thugs’, an epoch birthing my political education and activism.

Little by little, step by step, together suffering colossal losses, surviving pyrrhic victories, we have matured as a body politic. Even when entire elections where vitiated there was a bourgeoning civility, we accepted the transfer of power from term to term and in 2015 from one government to the other. This is why in our history of recent vintage the actions of a few possess the potential to set us back 20 years and squander all of our gains.

The persistent, needless attacks on our government on all fronts, and more particularly on our President must be rejected by all Guyanese. Our young country deserves a chance to continue to blossom and bloom. ‘Madness’, they say, ‘is doing the same things over and over but expecting a different result. We can no longer be content to fight the battles of others, started before many of us were born. Another approach is needed. Another world is necessary, if we are to build a different country for a different age.

In modern political philosophy is the notion you ‘campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.’ A former President, hot on the trail some years ago, bellowed, “You do not run a country by being against things. What are you for?” The rhetoric was directed at the then opposition. All of us must contemplate such a statement, and ask the question. It is time to govern. What are you for?