The first Arrow I wrote this year was intituled “Burnham is back”, in which I advanced that the only reason power-drunk individuals like Attorney General Basil Williams are allowed to throttle democracy through political bullyism and witch-hunting, is because the President himself endorses this method. When the APNU/AFC-composed Cabinet committed its first blunders, coalition supporters defended that President Granger had nothing to do with the corruption and incompetence of his Ministers who acted in their own capacities and not under his directives. However, two years well into the PNC-led coalition’s mandate, have revealed President Granger to be that autocratic leader who dictates with an iron hand, the anti-democratic policies which have set Guyana on its current path of regression. When I wrote this year’s first Arrow, I was part of the many who believed Granger to be nothing less than the late dictator Burnham’s heir, but posing an even more dangerous threat to Guyana’s development as a democracy, due to his military training and his talents for historical revisionism. I still hold strong to that belief.
This theory was concretised when on Burnham’s 31st death anniversary, Granger declared the man who set the Army on civilians, the “author of social cohesion and architect of national unity”. This is the same Burnham under whose regime Dr Walter Rodney was assassinated and who led inhumane policies against the rural East Indian population of Guyana.
Last Friday, on the occasion of the People’s National Congress’ (PNC) 60th anniversary, party General Secretary Oscar Clarke, emphasised the intensity of Granger’s personal commitment to continue in Burnham’s footsteps. He was quoted as saying: “Our present leader has taken that mantle and is carrying forward the ideas of Burnham today because they are relevant to what is happening in this country even now (…)”. Yes. Burnham is back, and this time I’m not the one saying it, but the PNC is.
Unsurprisingly, further glorification for Guyana’s former dictator was undertaken at the event by party Chairman Basil Williams, who in his usual simplistic jargon unbefitting for Guyana’s AG, expounded that Burnham was a prophet and that Guyana’s “main beef now” is “corruption”, “misrule” and “partisanship”, and that coalition retribution involves “people getting locked up”. Evidently, he was alluding to the arrest of six People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) members who were part of the GRDB’s Board of Directors. From among the 16 individuals who formerly comprised the said Board of Directors, only the six PPP/C affiliates, two of whom are sitting parliamentarians, were inculpated on clearly dubious and disputable grounds.
If anyone harboured doubts about Granger’s complicity in fuelling discriminatory policies, protecting incompetent Government officials and political tyrants, and encouraging corruption, this can no longer be the case. Not for instance, with the deliberate usurpation of national establishments such as SOCU, for political ends, nor Granger’s grotesque demarche in defending Basil Williams’s outrageous attack on Justice Holder. Incidentally, the latter is arguably a clear demonstration of the President and his Cabinet’s contempt for the separation of powers, in this instance, the Judiciary and the Executive.
If anyone harboured doubts about the threat Granger poses to Guyana’s nation building, these doubts dissipated with the emergence of policies aimed at the strengthening of the military and its rapprochement with the State, through for instance, the strategic placement of former high-ranking military men, in Government. Subsequently, the surprise was only slight upon hearing Granger allude to the possibility of using the Army to suffocate peaceful protests against the corrupt SCS parking meter deal. Similarly, policies frighteningly reminiscent of those implemented by Burnham and geared towards the destruction of traditional income earning sectors, in particular the agriculture sector on which depend the significant majority of Indo Guyanese inhabiting rural Guyana, have widened the gaps of socioeconomic disparity and testify to the latent ethnic discrimination guided by the Coalition.
Not of least importance, is the Granger regime’s systematic denunciation of all criticisms, regardless of whether they emanate from the media, civil sector, civilians or other polities. Any criticism is quickly dubbed “propaganda”, while justification of inefficiency, incompetence, opacity and corruption generally resumes to blaming the PPP/C, despite that the PNC-led coalition has been in office for now over two years, and that it inherited an economic legacy of nine years of ?3% sustainable economic growth.
With the unrelenting economic recession, the ethnic discrimination which prevails and the assault on democracy, Clarke is indeed correct. Burnham walks again, stronger and more determined than ever.
