Facing the Fire Together

THE 592 GUARDIAN•ACCOUNTABILITY & INTEGRITY JOURNALISM•GUYANA

Facing the Fire Together

BOARD EDITORIAL By Hem Kumar, Editor

Agency, Consent, and the Case for Conditional Solidarity

There are truths about Guyana today that require no argument, only acknowledgment. The rising cost of living is not a talking point — it is what a mother in Georgetown calculates every time she stands at a market stall. The outward migration of skilled and unskilled Guyanese alike is not abstraction — it is the empty seat at a family table that used to be full.

The reliance of the wealthy on foreign goods and services, and the quiet relocation of officials’ own families and wealth to North America even as they preside over the systems the rest of the country is told to trust, are not rumors — they are patterns, observed and repeated, in an oil-rich era that promised otherwise.

These are lived truths. This editorial does not dispute a single one of them.

But truth, on its own, is incomplete without the question of agency. Governance is not a force that operates in a vacuum, imposed from above onto a people with no part in its continuation. It is sustained — reinforced, legitimized — by consent, and consent can be active or it can be passive.

At public outreaches and political engagements across this country, we see crowds gather, applaud, and reaffirm support for the very administrations presiding over the inequities so many, rightly, lament

That matters. It cannot be waved away. And yet — this is not an indictment of the Guyanese people. It is an indictment of the conditions that manufacture their acquiescence.

To call for accountability from citizens without naming the mechanisms that constrain their choices would be dishonest.

♦Patronage networks that tie land, employment, and opportunity to political loyalty.

♦Ethnic mobilization that converts elections into referenda on identity rather than governance.

♦Information environments that reward loyalty and punish dissent.

These are not excuses offered on behalf of a passive electorate — they are the architecture within which “choice” is exercised.

A people who have survived under structures engineered to produce dependency are not, by that fact alone, complicit in their own condition. They are, in significant part, victims of circumstances not of their own making.

That distinction matters — and it is precisely why the answer cannot be resignation, from anyone, anywhere.

There is a temptation, particularly among those of us who observe from a distance, to translate frustration into judgment, and judgment into a verdict rendered from safety upon those who remain. That temptation must be resisted, and resisted first by us. No one — least of all those of us writing from the comfort of the diaspora — has standing to demand discomfort of others while seeking refuge from it ourselves.

If the call is for those at home to stop sitting and start standing, that same call must be answered by those abroad. It is not enough to send remittances that, however well-intentioned, can quietly reinforce the very dependency structures under critique. It is not enough to critique from a position that carries none of the daily risk borne by those who critique — or organize, or vote differently — while still living under the systems in question.

No one gets to stand outside the fire and issue verdicts on who is standing in it correctly.

This is the meaning of we are all in this together. Not a slogan, but a discipline. No one — not the citizen at home weighing loyalty against livelihood, not the diaspora member weighing comfort against contribution — gets to stand outside the fire and issue verdicts on who is standing in it correctly.

What, then, is the alternative to both resignation and unconditional charity? It is conditional partnership — solidarity with terms. In the local vernacular: we will not simply give you a fish ; we will teach you to fish. Diaspora engagement, if it is to mean anything beyond ceremony, cannot be unconditional loyalty repackaged as remittance, nor can it be charity that asks nothing of its recipients and changes nothing in its givers.

It must be capacity-building: support for independent institutions rather than individuals, investment in civic and legal literacy, resources tied to demonstrated organizing rather than to silence bought through comfort. And it must be reciprocal — a partnership that asks as much discomfort of those who give as of those who receive.

This is not a theoretical posture. It has been tested. In the wake of the MV Barima tragedy, as a new and unprecedented Gen Z-led movement surfaced demanding accountability, the instinct among those of us in civil society who have done this work for years was not to co-opt it but to support it — to identify its ideological authors, consult experienced organizers on how structure could be offered without control, and extend a hand.

That hand offered guidance, mentorship, the accumulated experience of those who have organized and advocated in this country for decades. The response was nothing silence.

An outreach offering both editorial engagement and a seat at a multi-stakeholder table, was met with silence.

“That hand was extended three times — not merely for comment, but for a seat at the table where civil society, business, and government were already being convened. It was not once acknowledged.”

Another separate attempt was met with a request — specific and equipment-based: a drone, and a controller capable of producing high-quality YouTube footage, offered in exchange for footage of protest actions.

A street protest does not require broadcast-quality aerial video. It requires people, presence, and the will to stand where they can be seen. Every image of every protest to date has come from a phone in someone’s hand, and that has been enough. When guidance is met not with a question about strategy, sustainability, or structure, but with a request for equipment better suited to content production than to accountability, it is worth naming plainly what that reveals.

This is not raised as grievance. It is raised as diagnosis. A movement’s readiness to receive structured partnership is itself information — and what it reveals here is not a lack of good faith, but a gap in the very capacity that partnership exists to build. If the immediate need is not yet the ability to organize a sustained coalition but something more basic — coordination, communication, the infrastructure of trust — then that is the need to be met first, honestly, before anything more ambitious is proposed. Anything else is simply theater in a different costume and not advocacy. It is another version of the sitting-and-waiting this editorial has already named as the problem.

This is not without precedent. This nation did not arrive at independence because its forebears had the comfort of waiting for someone else to secure it on their behalf. They did not have the luxury of remaining seated. Whatever else separates that generation from this one, the standard they set was not comfort — it was risk, undertaken in common cause. That standard remains available to us. It has not expired.

No one can fight harder for a people than that people is willing to fight for itself — and no diaspora can stand indefinitely on behalf of those unwilling to stand with it. But the reverse is equally true: no one at home should be expected to stand alone while those abroad remain seated in safety, offering critique in place of contribution.

The trajectory of this nation will not be changed by complaint alone, nor by charity alone, nor by loyalty offered without condition. It will be changed when those at home and those abroad recognize the fire as shared — and choose, together, to face it.