Policy Framework of Arrested Development.
Arrested Development speaks to the condition of the poor and underserved who have for the most part been left behind and have not had the full benefit of government services. Arrested development is principally caused either by government incompetence or deliberate government policy to engineer and maintain certain sections, targeted groups of a population, in poverty and insufficiency. Guyana’s situation in which according to a recent report, around 46% of the population is in poverty, is a classic example of arrested development engineered by government policy makers to:
- Benefit themselves
- Agenda of Marginalization of Sections of the Population
The following are policies of the PPP which produce arrested development among the population to benefit themselves:
- Keeping Guysuco open by spending billions of dollars (estimated to total around G$118 billion by 2020, money which could have been distributed among sugar workers along with land and agricultural support facilities) every year to keep sugar workers from progressing and especially to maintain them as a block of voters while their children generally suffered under the yoke of inadequate education.
- Engineering low income opportunities for the general population by maintaining the education system in its current dismal state so that it benefits the wealthy class while generating thousands of underperforming students every year. Many of these engineered underperformers often do not escape their lot and never go on to tertiary education, keeping them at an educational level where they often do not understand what is happening to them politically and economically.
- Allowing rice millers to continually underpay rice farmers for their paddy to benefit acolyte millers with possible kickbacks to government officials.
Arrested development is also pursued by the PPP administration as a matter of political spite in the case of public servants, with the government refusing to engage in collective bargaining with unions since 1999. Here public servants and their children suffer from the combination of depressed incomes (government owes public servants billions for all the backyears they refused to engage in negotiations) and poor educational services.
Both the PPP and PNC incorporate a philosophy of class in their politics, with the ruling class comprising government officials and cronies in the private sector, and the working class whose welfare derive from the dictates and policies of government. Rice farmers were probably taken aback by the plunder they endured at the hands of millers with the PPP under Jagdeo. They didn’t know that in historical communist dogma, farmers were considered a political nuisance, an ignorant lot in spite of their wealth, who kept trying to influence political outcomes. They were allowed to be robbed because Jagdeo and his communist dogma saw them receiving money for their paddy as fat sheep ready to be sheared. Nothing ever came of these incidents, no millers prosecuted, to the best of my recollection. For itself, the PNC’s decision to give its ministers, who happen to be public servants, a 50% increase, and the rest of the public service, teachers included a meagre 8%, is an example of class influencing policy. And they had absolutely no regard or respect for sugar workers and their children’s welfare.
Workers in the private sector suffer from depressed wages and working conditions as a consequence of government’s malfeasance in negotiating in good faith with unions. Summarily, the entire working population suffers under the yoke of government’s deliberately vicious attitude towards public servants’ salaries.
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