propaganda press! state sponsored, people powered.

When the killings occurred at Lusignan, my column on the subject took the view that the western embassies and Caricom immigration officials are going to be more determined to prevent Guyanese from entering their countries because they will feel that there will be a mad rush to leave. Now the Bartica massacre will make them more inflexible.
But we have arrived at truth. The truth is since the diabolical attack on Bartica, there is widespread concern among Guyanese of every strata of life that the point of no return has been reached; it is time now to just leave Guyana. Guyana has not worked. It will never work.
This morning I spoke to one of the safest Guyanese I know living in this country. I use the word “safest” in the sense that I know he has no intention of migrating.
I put him in the same category with Colin Smith of the Catholic Standard, Adam Harris and me; three persons that have no yearning to live outside of Guyana that I know of. But this morning he told me at UG, where he works, that after Bartica, it is time he considers the prospect of leaving. I went cold. If this guy could say that, then the possibility is prodigiously strong that all Guyanese can say it. There can be no doubt about it; Guyana will collapse if there isn’t a radical intervention of will right now. That will has to come from the major stakeholders in society. It will not come from the Office of the President.
Nothing, absolutely nothing moves the PPP to go beyond narrow political incestuousness. This is the nature of the people. The worst natural disaster we had was the great flood of 2005. The opposition PNC, a group named the Citizens’ Initiative and other organizations including the management and staff of this newspaper were all over the affected areas pursuing their nationalist dream of helping their country.
But the Guyanese people did not know this. GTV should keep showing President Jagdeo for twenty-four hours each day as the knight in shining armour.
The state media in a mood of atrocious narrow-mindedness totally blanked out the selflessness of other Guyanese. It was an act of immorality that this nation should not forgive the PPP for.
Then came the Lusignan Holocaust. And the vulgarity continued. Oliver Hinckson was accused of a really bad thing. Mark Benschop was accused of a terrible thing. These two persons were entitled to due process of law but the incestuous cabal that runs this country was out to score political points.
They took over the state media again. In shameless nights and days, the incompetent directorship criticized in the ugliest manner, true Guyanese patriots that accused the Guyana Government of hopeless incompetence.
Father Malcolm Rodrigues, a heroic figure whose nationalist integrity and patriotic commitments none in the present leadership of this country can match, was singled out for venomous bites.
One person in Barbados that this writer knows of even stooped to the low level of using a pen name in his vitriolic outpouring against Father Rodrigues. He knew he would have been despised if he had used his real identity.
We come now to the Bartica massacre. The political masqueraders were out in full force again. The state media again became a football in a fashion that would have made Forbes Burnham blush. These are rulers that have not even a modicum of conscience in them.
So the Government agreed to meet with the major stakeholders. The moment of hope was for the confluence of all the major actors in this troubled land.
Then political obsession intruded. It was to be expected. Instead of having the concerned parties sit together out of which could have been born the camaraderie of sensitivity to each other’s desires, the divide and rule game was played out. The private sector saw the President separately. The opposition parties met the President separately. This should not have been done.
The private sector and the opposition parties have failed this nation in a moment of utter desperation when their shoulders were needed. They should have insisted to President Jagdeo that he meet with both constituencies simultaneously as agreed upon.
This writer knows that some officials of the private sector were incensed at the disjuncture that occurred. It was reported to me by my media colleagues that Mr. Corbin was livid but told the media that he still attended because it was a national emergency and Guyana came first. This lack of nationalism is at the heart of the crisis that has brought us to where we are. In yesterday’s column I made passing reference to my UG seminar due on February 28.
This corner in this newspaper is not the place and time for an academic dissertation into the nature of state behaviour in Guyana since 1992. But in that upcoming seminar, I will posit a theory of Guyanese politics that has never been before placed on the table for discussion in intellectual circles here and in the region.
I contend that the difference between the Burnhamite totalitarian system and the PPP autocracy, especially the Jagdeoite state, is that there is no nationalist embrace among PPP leaders. This is what delineates the PPP Government and the PNC Government from Burnham through to Hoyte.
It is the lack of nationalist love by the leaders of the post-1992 state that has led to a monumental manifestation of alienation among certain sections of the population of which the sarcoma of violence may be an off-shoot.
I will adumbrate in that UG seminar the theory that what we have in Guyana today is a state that hates itself. I will attempt to show that given the way both Africans and East Indians evolved in the Guyanese economy, both groups see the role of the state in a dialectically contradictory manner; in other words in diametrically opposite ways.
Space consideration prevents me from adding more on this subject but I will delve into it more fully on February 28. We have come to the most frightening moment in Guyanese history after the disturbances of the sixties.
The opposition forces and civil society should not allow the PPP and the Presidential Secretariat to manipulate this tragic trajectory of sorrow for political gains.
I argued in a column after the Lusignan Holocaust that Mr. Jagdeo’s presidential style is too uncompromising, authoritarian and alienating to allow for the mollification process in the Guyanese society. His rule exacerbates the fault-lines in the Guyanese polity.
The PPP should make and take the historic decision to begin the healing process by choosing a new president. Time is not on the side of this country.