When Will Guyana Protest Its Real Crisis?

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

When Will Guyana Protest Its Real Crisis?

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

There comes a point when political loyalty ceases to be conviction and becomes intellectual bankruptcy. It pains me to say it, but Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo may have been right when he observed that Guyana has “some really stupid people, really stupid people.” At the time, his words were offensive, arrogant, and unbecoming of a man in high office. They remain so.

Yet the spectacle now unfolding around the Leader of the Opposition has exposed a public willingness to abandon reason, principle, and memory in the service of partisan allegiance. People who loudly condemn the Government for abuse, corruption, impunity, and contempt for the public interest are now contorting themselves into defending conduct by their political champion that was senseless, indefensible, and devoid of any public purpose.

They have not rallied around a cause, a principle, or an injustice; they have rallied around a man. Worse still, they do so while the nation’s most devastating loss of life under any Guyanese administration remains reduced to a convenient footnote—its victims and survivors denied accountability, justice, and closure. The bitter irony is that the man now elevated as a symbol of resistance was himself a senior participant in the very political machinery his supporters now portray as uniquely evil.

Is he truly the lesser of two evils—or merely the evil they have chosen to excuse?

Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of citizens are taking to the streets—not to worship political personalities, not to demand special treatment for one individual, and not to defend the reckless actions of a political favorite. They are protesting the issues that determine whether families can live with dignity: unaffordable food, high rents, stagnant wages, inaccessible housing, failing public services and uncertain futures for their children.

Protest in Paris

In France, Belgium, Portugal and Italy, the demonstrations may differ in scale and circumstance, but the central message is unmistakable: people are demanding a better quality of life and greater accountability from those elected to govern.

Meanwhile, in Guyana, too many among us remain trapped in the old and debilitating politics of personality, tribal loyalty and unquestioning followership. Once again, citizens have been mobilized around the fate of one man—the “LOO”—a man who, by all accounts, went looking for trouble and found it

.That is their right. Citizens may protest, express solidarity and raise concerns about due process. But the troubling question remains: where is this same urgency when Guyanese families face the everyday emergency of survival?

Where are the mass demonstrations over the escalating cost of food, rent, transportation, electricity, medicine and school supplies? Where is the outrage over low wages that cannot keep pace with inflation? Where is the sustained public pressure over inadequate public services, poor roads, unreliable drainage, overcrowded health facilities, weak accountability and the widening gap between oil wealth and ordinary people’s lived reality?

Guyana is now an oil-producing state with revenues that were once presented as a pathway to transformation. Yet for many households, the promise of prosperity remains painfully distant. Parents still stretch salaries from one payday to the next. Pensioners still choose between medicine and groceries. Young people still confront unemployment, underemployment and migration as their most realistic paths forward. Small businesses struggle with high operating costs, while consumers absorb rising prices with little relief.

But instead of organizing around these national failures, sections of our society repeatedly allow themselves to be summoned into action for personalities.

That is not political consciousness. It is political captivity.

The freedom, vindication or public elevation of any single political actor will not lower the price of a bag of groceries. It will not make housing affordable. It will not repair a broken road, reduce hospital waiting times, create productive jobs, strengthen schools or ensure that oil revenues are managed transparently for generations yet unborn.

And it most certainly will not deliver justice where justice is most urgently owed: to the victims, to the survivors, and to the families left carrying an unbearable burden of grief, uncertainty and loss.

This is a harsh and unforgiving indictment of every person who chose political excitement over human compassion; of every citizen who found a voice for one man yet remained silent for more than 100 dead Guyanese; and of every leader who has permitted delay, unanswered questions and apparent indifference to replace truth and accountability.

When citizens abandon their fellow Guyanese at their most desperate moment, they expose a selfishness that no slogan, political chant or public display can conceal. This is not merely an institutional failure. It is a national moral failure.

Guyana must engage in serious introspection. We must ask ourselves what kind of people we have become when grief on this scale cannot move us, when bereaved families must fight alone for answers, and when the pursuit of justice for the dead can be so easily overshadowed by loyalty to a living political personality.

That is not solidarity. It is political theatre—a performance staged to conceal a far deeper disgrace: our growing disconnect from humanity

No individual—regardless of how loudly his supporters chant his name—can substitute for a functioning system of governance.

It is time for Guyanese to snap out of the follower mindset. We must reject the dangerous idea that our future depends on attaching ourselves to political messiahs, ethnic champions or loud public figures who claim to speak for the people while the people’s material conditions continue to deteriorate.

Mental slavery is a powerful bondage because it convinces citizens that loyalty is more important than principle, that personalities matter more than policy, and that defending a political figure is somehow equivalent to defending one’s own interest. It is not

A politically mature society asks harder questions. It demands to know what government is doing to bring justice to the Barima tragedy, curb the cost of living. It asks why oil wealth has not produced stronger public services, more affordable housing, better-paying jobs and meaningful social protection. It insists on transparency in public spending, integrity in procurement, independent institutions and consequences for incompetence, waste and corruption.

If Guyanese can gather in large numbers for one man, then surely Guyanese can gather in even greater numbers for every family struggling to put food on the table.

If citizens can find their voices to demand the release of a political figure, then they can find those voices to demand that government explain why prices remain high, why wages lag behind, why public infrastructure repeatedly fails, and why the benefits of national wealth are so unevenly felt.

A Nation’s Distorted Priorities

The moral failure becomes even more disturbing when placed beside the country’s response to what many regard as the largest single tragedy in Guyana’s history: the loss of more than 100 Guyanese lives in the Barima ferry disaster. The public response was painfully lukewarm. At no single observance, protest or public showing did the numbers appear able to muster even 250 citizens.

There was no sustained national mobilization. No comparable willingness to disrupt normal life. No overwhelming public demand for answers worthy of the scale of that human loss.

An incident of such historic magnitude should have awakened the conscience of the nation. It should have united Guyanese across race, party, class and geography around one simple demand: truth, accountability, justice and respect for the dead. Instead, the response has too often been silence, indifference and a shameful absence of collective solidarity.

But when one political figure—one man who allegedly went looking for confrontation and ended up in custody—become the subject of a mobilization, and suddenly there is passion, noise, outrage and a readiness to shut down the town.

That is not solidarity. It is political theatre—a performance staged to conceal a far deeper disgrace: our growing disconnect from humanity More than 100 people died. Many families were left with grief, trauma and unanswered questions. Others became victims of the consequences that followed—uncertainty, financial hardship, emotional devastation and a prolonged sense that their loved ones had been forgotten. Yet the inquiry has faced troubling delays, the recovery and salvage of the Barima remain matters demanding clarity, and questions surrounding events connected to the tragedy have not received the transparent and urgent resolution the public deserves.

What does that say about us

It says too many Guyanese have allowed personality politics to replace humanity. It says the suffering of grieving families cannot compete with political loyalty. It says that the death of more than 100 fellow citizens can be met with public apathy, while the detention of one politically favored man can summon crowds, outrage and theatrical displays of allegiance.

This is not a healthy national culture. It is a moral and ethical collapse. A society that cannot stand in meaningful solidarity with its dead, but can rapidly mobilize for the political inconvenience of one man, must confront an ugly reality: it has become bankrupt in empathy and shamefully detached from its own humanity.

Guyana cannot build a just, modern and prosperous country on such distorted priorities. We must mourn our dead with more than words. We must demand answers with more than occasional statements. And we must reserve our strongest national mobilization not for personalities, but for the lives, dignity, safety and future of all Guyanese.

The real protest Guyana needs is not for a personality. It is for a country.

It is for the mother at the market calculating what she can leave behind. It is for the father whose wages disappear before month-end. It is for the young graduate with no meaningful opportunity. It is for the pensioner rationing medication. It is for every citizen who was promised that Guyana’s wealth would improve their life but is still waiting for that promise to become real.

Until we break from personality politics, we will continue to be used, divided and distracted. And while we chant for men, those responsible for the condition of the nation will continue governing without the public pressure they deserve.

Guyanese must decide: will we remain followers of personalities, or will we become citizens who demand results?