A Generation Introduces Itself With Silence

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

A Generation Introduces Itself with Silence

What We Saw Outside the Office of the President — and Why It May Outlast the Ministers Who Ignore It

By Hem Kumar, Editor

I have covered Guyanese politics long enough to know the difference between a crowd that has been organized and a crowd that has organized itself.

What gathered outside the Office of the President this past week belonged unmistakably to the second category. They did not arrive under a party banner. They did not chant the slogans of any of the coalitions that have spent the last two weeks fighting over the wreckage of the MV Barima.

They arrived under a name of their own choosing — We The People — in white T-shirts they had bought with their own limited means, to stand in solidarity with the Amerindian Peoples Association’s continuing action, and then, deliberately, to stand apart from it as well.

Listening to live feeds  with representatives of the group this is what I can deduce .

They did not give us a press release  or a spokesperson’s card; what they showed us  was a banner, five feet of red, green, gold and black, printed with a demand rather than a grievance: “We The People Demand — Ministerial Accountability — Edghill Must Resign.” Their message was bold and stated plainly:  this was not a political party’s operation, and no political party paid for it.

No one incurs an expense they can barely afford to stage a performance nobody asked for.

I want to be careful here, in the way this publication  has tried to be careful with every claim it has made about the Barima disaster since July 18. My own notes from that afternoon are a corraborated  account, not a transcript — we did not take names or recorded interviews off of social media .

What I offer first is my own judgment as an editor who has watched this country’s protest movements rise and dissolve for decades: these were young people, largely surviving on stipends and family support, who chose to spend what little they have on a shirt and an afternoon in the sun outside a government building. That is not the behavior of people staging a show for an audience. It is the behavior of people who have run out of patience with the alternative — waiting.

A MOVEMENT INTRODUCES ITSELF

What We The People represents is still, by its own account, less than two weeks old. It is, on the record now, more precisely described than I could offer from memory alone. Kisskadee Watch, reporting on the same demonstration, identified the protesters as drawn largely from the University of Guyana, gathered in solemn silence outside the Office of the President, holding placards and observing moments of silence for the seventy-three confirmed dead. That reporting confirms what we saw: this was not a chanting crowd or a rally in the mode of the Joint Opposition’s July 27 walk-in. It was quiet, deliberate, and unmistakably generational in its composition.

The same reporting adds a detail this publication thinks is important to state precisely, rather than round off into a cleaner story than the facts support. Organisers maintained that the protest was independent and non-partisan — and I have no reason to doubt that framing was sincerely held.

But members of the We Invest in Nationhood party and A Partnership for National Unity were present in support, alongside members of civil society. That is not a contradiction. A movement can hold its own identity, set its own terms, and still draw solidarity from people who arrive under other banners without becoming those banners.

What matters is who called the protest, who wrote the placards, and who is committing to return — and on all three counts, the record points to the students, not the parties standing behind them.

One of the organisers, Chandradatt Jagdeo, put his own name to a public accounting of the turnout on Facebook afterward: a movement “not even 2 weeks old,” he wrote, “NOT sponsored by any Political party,” that brought “hundreds, 300+ (I did not do a head count) people out.

I record that figure as his claim, made publicly and under his own name, corraborated independently by other attendees describing the same afternoon in the same terms — not as this publication’s own verified count. That distinction matters to me more than the number does.

A movement that can produce a named organiser willing to put a figure on the record, and independent attendees willing to describe the same event unprompted, has already cleared a bar that a great many protest claims in this country’s history have not.

WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN A SINGLE PICKET

Guyana has no shortage of protest. The Joint Opposition marched into the National Assembly in black on July 27. The Amerindian Peoples Association has picketed the Office of the President twice in the same week, led by Executive Director Jean La Rose, demanding accountability for communities in Region One that absorbed the disaster’s heaviest losses. Families of the accused T&HD crew have taken to the Den Amstel and Melanie public roads. Every one of these actions has been, in its own register, legitimate.

What distinguishes We The People is that it belongs to none of them.  It is not the opposition’s protest, dressed in the opposition’s colors, chanting the opposition’s slogans of “who must go.” It is not a union action, not a party rally repackaged as civil society, not a demonstration organized by anyone who stood to gain a seat, a ministry, or a headline from it.

It is, on the evidence before me, a generation that watched its government’s handling of a mass-casualty maritime disaster — the shifting timeline on what caused the sinking, the scrubbed commissioner biographies, the pre-drafted memorial-site declarations circulated to grieving families before any consultation had genuinely occurred — and concluded that the normal channels of Guyanese political life were not going to produce the answers it was owed.

That conclusion, if it holds, is the more significant story here. Political parties in Guyana have spent sixty years organizing along lines this news -media has documented at exhausting length.

A movement that explicitly refuses that architecture — that stands beside the APA’s action without folding into it, that borrows the opposition’s demand for Edghill’s resignation without borrowing the opposition’s identity — is doing something Guyanese civil society has rarely managed to sustain: building a constituency for accountability that neither the government nor its established opposition can claim as their own.

WHAT COMES NEXT

This is not intended as a single afternoon of catharsis. Organisers have described this as the first in a planned series of weekly demonstrations, with the next gathering set for the same location — outside the Office of the President — at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, August 7.

A movement that commits to a recurring date, in public, before it knows whether anyone will show up a second time, is making a claim about itself that either holds or collapses in full view. That is a more honest test than anything this paper could construct for it.

I do not know yet which this is. I am not going to promise our readers a Guyanese Spring, because that promise is not mine to make on behalf of people I saw for an afternoon.

What I can tell them is this: a generation that the political establishment has largely assumed to be disengaged showed up, on its own initiative, under its own name, to demand that a government answer for seventy-plus deaths in the manner a Westminster democracy requires of it.

Whether the Ali administration treats that as a passing irritation or as the leading edge of something it can no longer manage through press conferences and pre-drafted declarations will do more to shape the next decade of Guyanese governance than any single resignation anyone is currently calling  for.

This publication will be eagerly awaiting for August 7. Whether the government chooses to notice is, as ever, its own decision to make — and its own consequence to bear.

When a government treats a body count as a communications problem, it should not be surprised when the young decide that protest is the only language left that it understands.

— Hem Kumar, Editor