August 01, 2024.
Happy Emancipation to all Guyanese of African descent. Emancipation Month offers African Guyanese an opportunity for contemplation of their forefathers who endured the abuses of slavery, who were mentally and physically battered to destroy their sense of self-worth, identity, to convert them into pliant robots, mindless slaves to serve the whims and desires of their slave masters. It also offers the African community time for reflection, to examine our status, economic and social progress, to contextualize our problems with the objective of offering concrete solutions for remedying areas needing greater emphasis.
While Indians who were brought to serve as indentured immigrants replacing emancipated slaves endured much of the atrocities meted out by plantation owners at the time, and there is no historical comparison to the vicious violence suffered by our African fore-parents, it has always been a penchant of mine to include them when treating the social and economic conditions post-slavery and subsequent to the end of Indentureship. This is because here African and Indian Guyanese, the descendants of other indentured immigrants, our native Amerindians, have a shared history which we would care to pay attention to collectively as a means of grappling with the trenchant challenges we face today.
Society, the population of a country, cannot escape the influence of their government on their lives. Even as Guyana now moves forward in leaps and bounds with our newly found oil revenues, we try to rationalize the fallen state of many Guyanese, with an estimated 46% living in poverty and insufficiency. It would take an entire book to chronicle the failures of our governments post-indentureship, post-independence, but a quick summary is what we know as common history, the abysmal failure of the dictatorial Peoples National Congress (PNC) in its misguided practice of socialism during its 28-year reign ended in 1992, followed by the PPP’s economic disembowelment of the African Guyanese community to exact political spite for the pervasive discrimination suffered by Indian Guyanese during the PNC’s rule. The PNC was also not beneath killing Walter Rodney, an African Guyanese of international acclaim, who was organizing a political solution against them. A crime unpunished, the hard lesson of Dr. Walter Rodney’s untimely death at the hands of the PNC was that any African Guyanese who rose to the level of understanding the destructive nature of the PNC’s dictatorship and sought to challenge his leadership among African Guyanese would have shared the same faith as Dr. Rodney.
A critical evaluation of those who remain within the PNC is that their continued idolizing of Burnham in spite of his crimes against the state, that they would gladly have him back as their leader, as Guyana’s dictator renders them void of the ability to discern what is good and right, without the requisite sense of justice, integrity and character necessary to be entrusted with the nation’s affairs. Because it is impossible for anyone in their right mind to condone Burnham’s atrocities against Guyanese. The PNC can be best understood by comparing them to the minions in the movie by the same name whose objective in life was finding the most evil person to serve as their master.
Indeed, Burnham and his PNC’s policy of victimizing Indian Guyanese has been the social disease which has survived to remain a destructive, divisive aspect of our culture. This has become ingrained in both the PNC and PPP’s policy of ethnic division which has been the basis for political control, which allows them both to engage in the most heinous acts of corruption and economic marginalization that has realized the pervasive levels of insufficiency and underdevelopment recorded to date.
Burnham and the PNC have moulded Indian Guyanese, and what remains of the PPP. I suggest that the PNC is itself responsible for the PPP’s general approach in its policy of economic marginalization as we know it today, and would go so far as to observe that they may have left a lasting impact on Bharrat Jagdeo.
While the PNC engaged and encouraged the marginalization of Indian and non-African Guyanese generally, their mismanagement and failure of their socialist policies reduced the welfare of African Guyanese, the majority of the population, to poverty as the Guyana’s decline in export revenues during their 28-year rule brought the importation of basic food items to a near standstill, forcing industrious Guyanese to engage in smuggling. Those old enough could well remember the absence of flour, potatoes, milk, many of the other imported goods now available items on our shelves and in our homes we take for granted.
The PPP’s policy willful economic marginalization of African Guyanese since 1992 has been one of the pillars of its economic framework, this for the most part being exercised in the bullying of public servants and their unions against the advice of our courts and marginalization of African Guyanese communities and villages. With the unions being instruments of the PNC, their only objective remains rallying public servants for political gains when suing the government and forcing them to arbitration as a means of getting even unpaid wages for years past is the obvious practical solution. African Guyanese therefore find themselves being used as political pawns by the PNC which claims to represent them, but as its recent 2015-2020 stint in office has shown, from the removal of Stabroek Market vendors to the selective 50% increase granted to their government ministers, public servants themselves, while doling out a measly eight percent to the rest of the public service and doing everything to avoid paying public servants better wages, even through arbitration.
The PPP’s handling of the Exxon contract stands as an affront and international embarrassment to all Guyanese as we witness Exxon literally stealing our money under this nonsensical contract which requires the Government of Guyana to pay Exxon’s share of income taxes and allows our profits to be used by Exxon to dig for additional wells in the absence of ring-fencing, a feature which forbids such misappropriation of our money. With an estimate of close to US$4.0 billion being lost in the absence of ring-fencing in the last four years, under either the PPP or PNC we can expect to lose another US$14-US$20 billion by 2036 to Exxon, unimaginable sums either of our two political parties are quite content to fritter away as Exxon and its executives reap the rewards of discovering the most corrupt and insanely stupid set of politicians the world has known. Why our poverty? The PPP and PNC are giving away our money. They collect US$5 million for themselves and give exxon US$1.0 billion every year, the idiots they are.
Whether in Victoria, Buxton, Georgetown, Linden, across the length and breadth of Guyana, African Guyanese, all Guyanese need to understand that the solution to their economic challenges, their insufficiency and poverty, is a new government. Indian Guyanese especially must understand that they hold Guyana’s future in their hands because our new political leadership, our new government cannot be achieved without their active involvement and participation. Without them Guyana will remain as it has been since independence, having exchanged our fore parents’ slave and colonial masters for politicians in the PNC and PPP, a nation enslaved. Only with them will Guyanese finally be able to say, “Free At Last! Free At Last!” of our modern day political slave masters.
African Guyanese should break ties with the PNC’s dictatorial politics and incompetence, and work to build stronger bonds with all ethnic groups as a means of creating a basis forging a strong and representative political party to defeat our major political parties at our upcoming national elections.
Happy Emancipation to all Guyanese of African descent. Towards the emancipation of all Guyanese in November 2025.
Democratic National Congress.