The breaking news was stark yesterday, as Pres Irfaan Ali announced the passing of Ashton Chase. “His death represents an incalculable loss to our nation. His name and contributions will forever be etched in our country’s political, labour and legal history. He made an exceptional contribution to Guyana’s nationalist struggle and political history, and was the last surviving member of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) established in 1946. He was among our finest legal minds, and was a pillar of our country’s early trade union activism, authoring the most authoritative work on our trade union history.” Wow!!
Born in 1926, Chase would’ve been only 20 when Cheddi Jagan, Janet Jagan, Jocelyn Hubbard and he founded the PAC, which began a series of talks and discussions that fired the imagination of the WWII generation, who’d been promised a new world. After all, weren’t the millions of deaths in WWII justified as necessary to “secure” democracy for the world?? Those were heady days for these youngsters – Jagan was only 27!! – who rejected the old, accommodationist, gradualist approach of the older generation of politicians. They were gonna storm the bastions of colonial power!!
After graduating from Alleyne’s High School, Chase did a correspondence course with Ruskin College in Oxford, England, but when the PPP was to be launched in 1950, he modestly stepped aside for Forbes Burnham, whom he felt was “brighter”. He would eventually proceed to London University, and enter the bar in the mid-fifties. This was after he was a Minister in the short-lived 1953 Government and during the same time that Burnham would split the nationalist movement – from which we’ve still not recovered!! Ahh…the ironies of fate!! If only this brilliant man wasn’t so modest!!
But we can see, from those days, the emphasis by the Creole Middle Class -which dominated politics then – on being “lettered” as necessary for political office. Your Eyewitness would’ve thought that the Burnham substitution for Chase would’ve cured the Guyanese people of that affliction – which Lloyd Best derided as “Doctor Politics”!! But we’re still infected, aren’t we?? Chase became the most noted labour lawyer – following in the footsteps of his grandmother, who was an official in Critchlow’s pioneering BGLU – and literally wrote the book on the subject!!
He also pleaded successfully in the Courts in the historic GuySuCo v Teemal (1983) case, when Burnham attempted to deny a salary increase – agreed to with the TUC – for GuySuCo workers. Burnham later passed legislation to overturn the decision – but for the first and only time, the Courts ruled the legislation unconstitutional!!
All in all, today’s youths should be informed of the great deeds modest men can achieve for their country. Bombast isn’t necessary for leadership!! Rest in peace, Mr Chase!!
…facts on cash crops
Cash crops are simply crops produced directly for the market. That’s all!! And our tradition with cash crops goes all the way back to slavery, when slaves were allowed to plant greens and ground provisions and sell at the Sunday markets. So, it’s a myth to think slaves had no experience with commerce. The problem, though, was that their efforts were limited to family labour, and, as such, were quite fragmented.
Today, we hear about “food security” and our commitment to fulfil Caricom’s “25 by 25” – reduce its US$6 BILLION food bill 25% by 2025. We gotta realize we’ll have to take a whole new approach to satisfying such a humungous market!! The first thing we gotta do is massively increase our scale of production of the identified crops. We can do this in two ways – through launching plantations, like the colonials did for producing coffee, cotton and sugar cane back in the day; or coordinating private farmers to produce the crops. Ain’t gonna happen spontaneously!!
…Guyanese interest
Your Eyewitness noted that Mia Mottley just received Venezuela’s highest honour from Maduro. But is the Agri-Food Sovereignty Agreement signed by her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kerrie Symmonds, and Ambassador to Caricom, David Comissiong, tied to Caricom’s “25 by 25”??
