VP Jagdeo made a stunning accusation about the Opposition last week. He said while they’re complaining moaning and bitching that the PPP government discriminates against African Guyanese from benefitting from its development program, they simultaneously ostracize and criticize African Guyanese entrepreneurs who win and execute government contracts! He identified an example in Linden where a local African Guyanese company Statement Inc., built a new, modern school in Linden!!
Why?? The VP explained it was because of the Afro Guyanese owners associating with PPP/C members!! They wouldn’t have criticised the company if it were owned by Indian or Mixed Guyanese!! So, it’s clear this is one more instance where the Opposition wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to continue hurling accusations of racism – and even “apartheid” – at the PPP just to keep African Guyanese in their camp – even if it means they’ll remain underdeveloped as when the Burnham Government locked them away in stagnation in his cooperative experiment!!
This kind of politicking is dangerous for Guyana at so many levels. We know that Guyana has been embroiled in ethnic politics – the most combustible politics as seen both here and across the world – ever since Burnham broke away from the PPP and mobilized African Guyanese sixty years ago to launch a veritable ethnic civil war in the early 1960s!! His subsequent racist discrimination against Indian Guyanese and elections rigging for almost three decades between 1964 and 1992 hardened those divisions into hermetically sealed enclaves.
After free and fair elections removed them from office in 1992, the PNC kept up a propaganda war designed to keep the racial animosities aflame. They accused the PPP of rigging the 1997 elections and plunged into street protests that saw widespread violence and arson against Indian Guyanese and their property in a strategy of “slow fyaah; mo’ fyaah”!! Losing the 2001 elections, direct attack against the police and Indian Guyanese villages were launched by five so-called “Freedom Fighters” who were sprung from prison and who holed up in the African Guyanese village of Buxton!! Over four hundred bandits and Indian Guyanese civilians were killed as vigilante groups supplanted the law enforcement agencies.
Fortunately, after the bandits were wiped out in 2008, multiracial politics reasserted itself and in 2015 the PNC/APNU/AFC coalition defeated the PPP government and assumed power. Sadly, they betrayed inclusivity promises; reverted to election rigging in 2020 and in Opposition have focused on intensifying the ethnic divisions once again!! They whipped out their “apartheid” charges but most insidiously also accused the PPP government of committing “economic genocide” against African Guyanese.
And this brings us to the VP’s observation about the PNC penalising African Guyanese who’re performatively deconstructing their cynical divisive agenda for their short-term political gains.
…racial unity
Slavery and climate change dangers were headlined at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) – where a contrite King Charles was in attendance. They selected Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey from Ghana as their new secretary-general – taking over from Britain and Dominica’s Patricia Scotland, who’d been on the job since 2016. On the slavery front, Botchwey, a supporter of reparations for transatlantic slavery and colonialism, is expected to push that issue now that it’s on the table!!
But that brings up an ancillary matter that’s been swept under the carpet – the responsibility of the African tribal leaders who captured and sold their fellow Africans to the Europeans. As Walter Rodney has researched and documented, the earnings from the sale of enslaved Africans helped several African Empires flourish. Their successor governments in the modern state system gotta bear some responsibility for the African condition in the Americas!!
Ironically, some local opposition types are dubbing folks who practise multiracial political mobilization here as “slave catchers”!!
…goodwill
The complaints about Venezuelan refugees/migrants squatters at Linden in Reg 10 and now at Ruby in Reg 3 brings to the fore the need for a comprehensive program to be designed by the international refugee bodies and or government.
