In his Independence Day 50+1 Speech, President David Granger referred to Guyana as a “Free State”, and some have wondered whether he realised he was invoking VS Naipaul’s 1971 ironic take on Indians, West Indians and Africans in the detritus of their “independence”, which proved to be a mockery of their grandiloquent predictions.
In Naipaul’s view, man’s injustice to man proved to be in no way different before or after independence: it was an exchange rather than a change of leaders. It would seem to be a Freudian slip of the President, who was in charge of imbuing the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) with the vision of then President Forbes Burnham’s Cooperative Socialist Republic, which ended in much of the same turmoil as the half-formed countries dissected by Naipaul.
From that perspective, it becomes quite worrying that the General Secretary of the PNC, Mr Oscar Clarke, only recently revealed that President Granger was not only following in the footsteps of the “Founder Leader” Burnham, but was pledged to complete the latter’s “vision”. “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.” What was that vision into which we are to be delivered as a “free state”?
President Granger explained, “The ‘free state’ is one that is free from discrimination; it is one that is built on the basis of respect for cultural diversity, political inclusivity and social equality.” But just as in the state that was constructed between 1966 and 1985 by the PNC, in the present, from the appointments of the government to the purchasing of pharmaceuticals, there have been both a pattern and practice of blatant discrimination. For instance, after criticising the practice when in Opposition, there has been a wave of dismissals of contracted professionals in the Public Service, only to be replaced by individuals from the PNC’s core constituency. The head of almost every Government department has been similarly sourced, and the question has to be asked whether there are none outside this group qualified for the jobs.
Also, as with the Burnhamite regime, the claims about “political inclusivity” ring hollow. Starting with its present coalition with the AFC, which catapulted it to power, there have been calls by Prime Minister Nagamootoo for the Cummingsburg Accord to be renegotiated. This is as a consequence of an eerily similar recapitulation of the dynamics of the PNC’s first coalition with the United Force (UF) when the latter was made ineffectual and eventually redundant through various stratagems. One adviser to the President has dismissed the contribution of the AFC to the electoral fortunes of the Government, and it would appear that the end of the pre-electoral arrangement is nigh.
But before the elections, the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition had insisted that “political inclusivity” fundamentally meant working out a modus vivendi with the People’s Progressive Party, which represented half of the Guyanese electorate. This proposal, however, was immediately dropped upon assumption of office, echoing Mr Burnham’s abandonment of his pre-1964 rhetoric that insisted only a coalition with the PPP, rather than with the UF, would represent real “national unity”.
The claims of “social equality” by the Burnhamite regime foundered on its insistence that, in an economy that was quite anaemic at best, a PNC party card was the prime qualification for jobs. Presently, while there is ongoing social support in the form of subsidies to PNC strongholds such as Linden, the Government ignored the recommendations of its CoI into the sugar industry — regarded as a PPP vote bank — to subsidise it for another three years to bring it to a point of sale.
Instead, the Government immediately plunged into mass layoffs that will see on the breadlines almost 10,000 persons outside its traditional support base. Ironically, the sugar industry was brought into its present state after its nationalisation by the Burnhamite regime, which then proceeded to impose a levy on profits, leading to a cessation of capital investment and an inevitable collapse.
Whither the “free state”?
