THIS past week so much has happened in these 83,000 square miles that it could easily be considered the hottest, busiest and most intriguing in recent political memory. I cannot think of a group of consecutive days in an election season that was as loaded with intrigue and drama as the last seven days.
One could say that there were moments during that five months debacle of 2020 that will stand out in our memory. Without a doubt, the 2020 elections season is probably the most memorable, but not the most intriguing, for the last quarter century. In 2020, there were several moving parts around a narrow laser-like focus of events, which no doubt gave it its memory etching characteristic.
Events of last week did not rise to that level given what was at stake. In the grander scheme of things, almost all the events of last week will fade from active political memory and may never be recorded when the history texts are written. But intrigue has flooded the political landscape with wild abandonment; it kept coming day after day. Each hour with its own intrigue and every awe consuming moment with its own set of moving parts. It was the single busiest week in a quarter century of politics. I had occasion to retort that during campaign season one day is equivalent to one normal year. Imagine seven years of political highlight reels packed into one week.
Events ran the gamut: from the faux pas quasi graphic sexual references on a campaign stage and its accompanying torrent of selective outrage, then a well-known bipolar machete-wielding personality made threats to harm a sitting minister, then there was the release and exposure of a raft of extorsion-laden secret recordings, to a jaded opposition figurine nestled overseas attempting to make a transborder case out of a popular social media personality strolling past his home more than four months ago. Then we saw the release of what appeared to be a pecuniary induced and carefully choreographed interview that cast a wide net of character assassination and criminal miasma in wild abandonment. We also received confirmation that one of the figureheads of Team Mohamed’s held suspicious clandestine meetings with unknown officials in the Venezuelan embassy, which certainly has the interest of the CIA, US Department of State and US Congress. Then the nasty viral vilification of the matriarch of the President, a model senior citizen who has made noteworthy contributions in the education sector. We also saw empty political gobble by a well-known fading political figure who sought to wrest the limelight from the top CXC performers by employing racial invectives to attempt to give his obscure campaign some prominence. There was also a prominent figure in Guyanese journalism who retracted the entirety of his supposedly explosive interview that was leaked with the expectation that it might change the electoral fortunes of the PPP. Just imagine that wasn’t all the political intrigue thrown up this week.
Among all the political intrigue of the week, I wish to extrapolate and highlight one lesson every politician should learn. I will keep my analysis sufficiently general to avoid igniting controversy.
The observation is that some very experienced public figures and seasoned politicians do not understand the nuances of Guyanese politics. The struggle of many politicians is that there is an internal philosophical contest between idealism and existential pragmatism. Some political figures respond to the many moving parts of our politics by constructing a set of social ideals and in doing so they come over as either hypocrites or distorters of facts.
As an example, a certain prominent political figure attempting to chastise the error of another, released a statement. Though accurate in its factual outlay, its stylistic construction, timing and the level of thoughtfulness poured into it, served only to overlay those basic facts with loaded subtexts and innuendoes. Given these conditions, when taken as a whole, the statement failed badly and lost its pillory value. Instead, it promoted sentiments that are inimical to the pragmatic mission and the very essence of the party’s political undertaking. The lesson here is that the only idealist constraint on our practice of politics is the law. Outside of that, everything else should weigh heavily in favour of the pragmatism of realpolitik. Social and moral realism is heavily biased in favour of individual community perspectives; things such as religion, education, ethnicity, profession and other interpersonal qualities. The intersections of these features are so varied that constructing ideals based on them will create more conflicts than they solve. Therefore, pragmatic ‘give and take’ is the only sensible way to handle matters in politics, a sphere of human activity that is highly transactional.
If a politician cannot appreciate that once a political direction has been crafted by the party apparatus, all personal idealistic trepidations become subservient to the general mission, that politician belongs with the dinosaurs.