IF you follow the output of a certain section of this country, you will believe a country’s democracy becomes fragile when the government, through the ruling party, does wrong things. This is a sermon preached every day in this country by the different opposition parties, the privately owned media and certain civil society organisations.
The narrative always goes like this – Guyana’s democracy is threatened because a minister of government or the president shows no accountability for their actions. This understanding of what exists inside the process of democracy is enormously flawed. Society is a multi-dimensional organism and many of its parts are important to the preservation of democracy.
Three pillars of democracy exist apart from that of the government. They are the opposition, the media and civil society. If there is a dangerously narrow-minded opposition, a civil society edifice that has no credibility and a media horizon that is dotted with unprofessional and politicised journalism, then democracy runs into trouble.
Society in Guyana hardly has a parallel in another country. In which nation can you have a transparency watchdog, and it remained silent when a national election was almost derailed by the incumbent? How can democracy thrive when such a body is highly flawed? You get fed up when you hear that democracy is in danger because the government did this and did that, but why democracy isn’t damaged when civil society has no moral compass?
In Guyana, what passes for civil society is simply laughable. The transparency body did not see anything wrong with the rigging of the 2020 national election but find fault with the 2025 election which met all the requirements of transparency. There isn’t today a government or an international organisation of repute that finds that the Government of Guyana was not legally elected in 2025.
Democracy must be in trouble in Guyana when civil society becomes a politicised creature rather than an independent arbiter. In which other country in the world is there a human rights organisation (Guyana Human Rights Association) that is reckless, irresponsible and biased as the one we have in Guyana? Surely, democracy has to be in trouble when civil society becomes part of the problem that endangers democracy.
But you never hear voices and see pens that expose these threats to democracy in Guyana and political theory is instructive in this matter – a country’s democracy gets into uncertain waters when society has organisations that oppose the government for narrow political reason. For the past 10 years in Guyana, if there has been any threat to democracy, it is the ugly descent into the world of politics by the media.
The Kaieteur News (KN) and Stabroek News (SN) from 2020 simply went into the gutter. This was the time for society to intervene and condemn this lurking danger to democracy. But not one human in the Guyana diaspora and in Guyana itself composed a critical thought of how nihilistic these two newspapers had become. Journalism lost its way in Guyana in 2024 and democracy was the loser.
The umbrella body, the Guyana Press Association, had a disgraceful internal election. The president which exceeded her term limits contested once more for office and only she and her acolytes in the executive had access to the list of voters. In the end, the voting turned out highly flawed.
But the very silent ones that watched the disappearance of credible, presentable and professional journalism in Guyana the past ten years have now crawled out of their crevices to call for an investigation into the President’s farm. They see dangers facing democracy because of the President’ farm but the myriad threats to Guyana’s democracy through the loss of a credible media terrain never bothered them.
The largest blot on democracy last year and this year came from Mr. Azruddin Mohamed. But when he entered politics there was no reverberating noise that this gentleman was creating conditions that may have caused Guyana’s democracy to fizzle out. Mohamed’s name was linked to a notorious homicide. Mohamed’s name was associated with the reckless use of a firearm that resulted in the death of a youth.
Mohamed’s wife was involved in a road accident on Mandela Avenue that resulted in the death of another citizen and the nation heard nothing more of the story. Mohamed was sanctioned by the U.S., then had an extradition request made against him. But when he decided to enter politics, there was no note or letter or advocacy by those who hate the government that this man will wreak havoc on Guyana’s democracy. The hypocrites that now see the ownership of a farm by President Ali as not a good sign for democracy is further testimony of they, themselves being a danger to democracy.
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.
