One of the most perplexing characteristics of the present regime is while the President, the present leader of the PNC, vowed to complete the “legacy” of Forbes Burnham, he studiously avoids Burnham’s articulated pronouncements for an overarching vision grounded on an ideological framework. For instance, Burnham never veered from his insistence that he was a “socialist” and that the tenets of that ideology would guide his efforts towards creating an egalitarian society encompassed in the slogan: “The small man will be the real man”.
Obviously, one accepts that times, circumstances and contexts change and so also, might ideology: but governments must have some guiding principles that, even very thinly, constitutes an ideology. Back in 1989, when then PNC leader Desmond Hoyte accepted the tenets of neo-liberalism dubbed “The Washington Consensus”, as a quid pro quo for the IMF loans, because he let it be known he was not a socialist. He therefore went along with their recommendations presumably because he accepted such tenets like a “night watchman state” and launched a traumatic downsizing of the Civil Service. He also launched the wave of privatization of the 80% of the economy that had been nationalized.
Dr Cheddi Jagan, on the other hand, while accepting the new global realities, made a strong case for the stabilization of the Public Service (for which he has never been given credit) and for GuySuCo not to be privatized. He offered cogent social and political reasons why the neo-liberal dogmas had to be modified for Guyana’s reality. His successors in the PPP also had to dance pragmatically between the raindrops as they reoriented the economy and stimulated modest but consistent economic growth during their terms of office so that the lives of the “working class” could improve.
What might have helped them to become more “pro-people” in their economic plans, which included subsidizing the depressed bauxite community of Linden even as they retained the sugar levy, was that the anti-people premises of the neo-liberal paradigm were beginning to unravel. Its edifice, of course, all came crashing down in 2007/2008. The US, for instance, was forced to intervene massively and directly into the private sector through their bailouts of the banking industry and the recapitalization of the manufacturing sector such as in the car industry. The interventory state was back.
The changed outlook towards the neo-liberal model of “development” went as far as accepting that “market fundamentalism” – which advocated that all decisions, even moral ones implicit in the levels of employment and poverty were to be made by the “impartial, utility-maximising” market – had to be jettisoned. The Brexit and Trump phenomena in Europe and the US respectively, are symptoms of large masses of citizen rejecting decisions being made by the market”.
Interestingly, early last December speaking at a high level forum on “Combating Pollution in the Extractive Industries” at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, President Granger offered hope he might have realized the direction from which the new economic wind was blowing and had rejected the neo-liberal dogmatism of ignoring that man had to be the centre of all development. He declared: “People, therefore, must be at the heart of the development of our natural resources. People must come before profits. The pursuit of profits has been accompanied, over the past century, by an exponential increase in extractive industries.” But he flattered to deceive.
Even as he spoke, his government announced the closure of three other sugar estates –Skeldon, Enmore and Rose Hall, in addition to Wales which had been closed a year earlier. Four thousands sugar-workers joined the 1700 already on the breadlines and the 2000 that worked with now redundant private cane farmers. President Granger and his PNC have evidently embraced the failed Neanderthal neo-liberal economic model, even as it is being abandoned elsewhere. The irony is that as far back as 1979, when the medicine was suggested to him by the IMF, Burnham dismissed them as an “International Mother F*****”.
How would he describe Granger?
