Your Eyewitness notes that the Opposition and its myrmidons are continuing to milk this year’s Emancipation commemoration for the longest time ever!! But there’s nothing wrong with doing that – if they’re constructive. After all, we know that Victoria’s Government just signing a piece of paper saying that slaves were “manumitted” didn’t necessarily mean anything if the conditions that defined slavery weren’t gotten rid of.
Think about it, folks. Aren’t we still producing sugar mainly by human labour – much as the slaves did back in the day? Planting, manuring, clearing weeds, catching rats, cutting cane, fetching it on our heads etc, etc? Can ordinary sugar workers live on $2200 per day?? So, should we be excited that Rose Hall is gonna be reopened and eleven hundred people from Canje are gonna be re-employed?? If we’re really emancipated, shouldn’t we have emulated our forebears and removed ourselves from the scene of our degradation? If it weren’t for the fortuitous oil strike, we’d still be hovering precariously above Haiti in the development ratings. And imagine Haiti was emancipated in 1804! But they became enmeshed with neocolonialism nonetheless, didn’t they?
So, the lesson your Eyewitness gets from our history is that we gotta deal with this hydra-headed monster called “neocolonialism” if we really want to live out the meaning of “emancipation”. So, what are its bases? We can do worse than go back to our own experience. When we got “independence” in 1966, Burnham and Jagan talked a lot about “emancipation”, neocolonialism, and freedom. Their way to get us freedom was to nationalize all the big industries, like sugar and bauxite, that were owned by the colonials and their cohorts. We, the Guyanese people, now owned our resources, and the White Man wouldn’t suck our life blood out any longer! That was the promise, at least!
But we know how that ended, don’t we? Even worse off than during colonialism – and some would say even slavery. Your Eyewitness doesn’t agree. At least, when we ran away to every country that we could enter – by hook or by crook! – Burnham didn’t send mercenaries to drag us back! Immigration agents of the receiving countries sometimes did that. We had new categories of citizens – back-trackers and deportees!
But your Eyewitness is excited about where we are right now – with billions of barrels of oil still to pump. He’s perfectly aware that Trotman and the PNC sold us down the river – as used to be said about the betrayal of slaves trying to escape!! But hey, the “crumbs” we’re getting aren’t anything to sneeze at. We can still fulfill our Emancipation dreams, can’t we?
But only if we quit fighting each other.
…with new institutions?
One of the lessons from slavery and the post-emancipation era (into the present) is that rather than each generation or each group trying to become free “from scratch”, we form institutions that would continue down the generations and evolve to deal with contingencies. The first was the early savings being pooled to purchase villages – land, which still remains one of the most solid investments, literally and figuratively.
But land just left lying doesn’t increase in value…it must be used to generate income – from farming or construction or otherwise. The co-op was the mechanism that Burnham proposed we use to mobilise to add value to land. Some still hanker for these. Have they actually worked? Do we need new institutions?
Then there was the “box hand”. Shouldn’t we have evolved this to owning banks after 183 years? Anyone can open a bank…the requirements are there on the Bank of Guyana website. All we gotta do is satisfy the requirements – which are doable.
And emancipate ourselves!
…to temper the excesses
Left to themselves, politicians will always abuse power. So how come the Opposition ain’t using the four Parliamentary Sectoral Committees to scrutinize the Government’s operations in real-time??
They can control excesses by grilling politicians – slowly over fire!!
