When Parliament Is Muzzled, The Street Must Speak- A Response to Rawle Small

When Parliament Is Muzzled, The Street Must Speak– A Response to Rawle Small

LETTER TO EDITOR

Dear Editor,

Mr. Small’s Kaieteur News  letter  dated August 12 dresses up a dangerous illusion: that in today’s Guyana, opposition silence or “measured” responses are somehow superior to constant confrontation. That theory is comforting to the ruling party and its apologists, but it collapses the moment you step outside the echo chamber and into the lived reality of ordinary people.

We are not living in a normal, healthy democracy where you can leisurely workshop counter‑budgets while corruption, marginalization, and discrimination politely wait their turn. We are watching a PPP government that has entrenched itself in every arm of the state, politicized institutions, punished dissent, and presided over a widening sense of fear and exclusion. In that climate, “instant and constant reaction” is not a performance; it is survival politics. When injustice is daily and aggressive, delayed reaction is surrender.

Take the Barima tragedy. Instead of transparent disclosure, open debate, and genuine accountability, the Government’s instinct has been to shield itself, manage optics, and hope the story dies. If the opposition did not react loudly and repeatedly, if it did not hold the Government’s feet to the fire, the victims and their families would be left to the mercy of a political PR machine. Calling that necessary pressure “background noise” is an insult to those whose lives have been shattered and a favour to those who want the scandal buried.

Mr. Small’s neat hierarchy—policy papers at the top, public reaction at the bottom—also ignores a very inconvenient fact: the PPP has systematically strangled the very arena where alternatives are supposed to be presented. At the last sitting of the National Assembly, a raft of bills was rammed through by the Government majority without serious debate. This is not parliamentary democracy; it is legislative bulldozing. When the Speaker is used as a gatekeeper to shut down opposition voices and when bills are passed like party circulars, it is cynical to turn around and chastise the opposition for not presenting their “coherent agenda.”

You cannot demand counter‑budgets and shadow policies from an opposition whose microphones are cut, whose motions are sidelined, and whose contributions are treated as a nuisance in the chamber. If Parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp, then the street, the media, and direct engagement with citizens become the only realistic forum for dissent. Criticising the opposition for “taking it to the street” while ignoring the deliberate muzzling inside Parliament is not analysis; it is spin.

Let us be blunt: the PPP benefits from a narrative that paints the opposition as noisy, immature, and unserious, because it shifts the spotlight away from its own record—its refusal to share power honestly, its willingness to legislate without debate, and its comfort with a politicised state apparatus. Some commentators, consciously or not, are helping launder that narrative. They scold the opposition for reacting “too much” to corruption and discrimination, as though the real problem in Guyana is not the abuse of power, but the audacity of those who call it out.

Yes, the opposition must deepen its policy work, sharpen its organization, and expand its reach among workers, farmers, youth, Indigenous communities, and the most vulnerable. But we will not pretend that Guyana’s crisis is a mere deficit of opposition white papers. The crisis is a government that treats oversight as an inconvenience, that uses its majority like a hammer, and that has turned Parliament from a forum into a fortress.

In these conditions, a quiet, well‑behaved opposition is exactly what the ruling party wants. Guyana needs an opposition that is loud when it must be, unyielding when rights are trampled, and prepared to confront power in the streets when the doors of Parliament are slammed shut.

If that sounds like “background noise” to some, perhaps the real issue is not volume, but whose comfort they are protecting.

Sincerely,  

Leyland Chitlall Roopnarine