I DO not agree with what the Democratic Party, while in power the past four years, tried to do with Mr. Trump. They were frenzied in their search for legal charges and loopholes in the laws to prevent him from running for election again. That is not the role of the court, and if the court bans persons from running for president or prime minister, that law should be removed.

When I was being taxied to my hotel after arriving in Grenada in 1983, a top party official who was there to look after my itinerary informed me, while we were driving, that the government had banned a Rastafari bookstore. I remembered my words vividly. I said, “Why did you do that?” I equally recall vividly his response: “They are counter-revolutionaries.”

When he said that, my mind went into several whirlpools, spinning out of control. I thought of Dr. Zhivago, one of literature’s most compelling books on the fictionalisation of true events. The Russian Revolution went wrong, and the Cuban Revolution happened because humans may have a genetic predisposition not to learn from the past.

I made it plain to the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, that I believed free and fair elections were the way to go in Grenada. Both agreed and told me that free elections would be held in Grenada soon. The population, not the courts, must decide who they want to be their government’s leader. I grew up on a political terrain in Guyana where my life was intertwined with the struggle for the right of people to choose their governmental head.

Ukraine chose a comedian. Who in Ukraine had the power to tell Ukrainians that they must not vote for a comedian? In Romania, the election commission barred the man likely to win the election because he is pro-Russian. Romania is part of the European Union (EU), and to think the EU allowed Romania to do that. So disgusted with what the EU did, the Vice President of the US, Mr. Vance, chastised the EU for what happened in Romania.

In France, the courts have banned, upon a criminal conviction, Marie le Pen from contesting the 2027 presidency. The courts should not have such powers. I honestly detest everything that Le Pen stands for, but once authorities decide who should participate in elections, that country will face turmoil.

This has been a long introduction to the legacy of Kwayana. I think the response to the rigging of the 2020 general election has destroyed the legacies of Eusi Kwayana, Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine and Moses Bhagwan. They were towering anti-dictatorship activists that influenced a generation, including my generation and me personally.

To have been part of the long days and nights sharing sentiments with these people believing that we embraced the same values of freedoms, liberties and equalities only to find out it was a mirage and a psychic devastation for me. Let me repeat for the 50th time: in March 2020, I voted for the Liberty and Justice party. As the days of March moved on, I saw a mountainous conspiracy to deny the winner of the 2020 general election, the PPP.  Who in Guyana in 2020 had the right to tell a party that won an election, it cannot govern? No one in 2020 had that right.

Something volcanic triggered inside of me. Was Guyana denying its people the right to vote for who they wanted? The PPP was denied that right in 1968, 1973, 1980, and 1985 and almost denied it in 1992, and now, in 2020, Guyana is doing that to the PPP again. I was not prepared to see Guyana revert to permanent power. I don’t know how my role was assessed, but I know in my heart I made a small contribution in 2020 to the banning of permanent power.

It was inconceivable to think that Eusi Kwayana would go down the road of endorsing election rigging. I thought that in his own unique style of writing, Kwayana would have chastised the clumsy and comical conspiracies. But this was not to be. In several replies to me in April 2020, he descended to levels of intellectual vulgarities, including that he cannot pronounce on rigging from outside of Guyana. His comedic defence of his untenable position went on and on to the point where this was not the Kwayana I knew.

Why he behaved like that I have explained in several columns, including an article in which I used Freudian analysis to explain his support for election rigging. See my column of January 29, 2025, titled, “The perennial deviousness in the Freudian mind of Eusi Kwayana.” I wish Kwayana the very best of health as he carries on, but for me, the iconic status and the legacy have been badly tarnished.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.