Last week, Guyana received an official 25-member delegation from the US, which included a Congressional Delegation (CODEL) of nine, headed by the Chairman of the very influential House Judiciary Committee. The other members included a number of military individuals with a nexus to Congress, and also staffers and family members. This was the largest CODEL to visit Guyana, and it is a solid signal that Guyana is in the US radar.
Before leaving on a private trip to the US, which caused him to miss the CODEL, Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, in his weekly column, alluded to the visit as the “Episodic Return of America”. He elaborated: “There have been previous episodic decades that could give justification for this negative nationalism (of the US being “a blood-sucking empire descending on Guyana”), going back to the late 1950s when the then British colony became a pawn in the Cold War. She was subsequently converted into a laboratory for every conceivable ideological stratagem of American imperialism, which has since been well documented. The role of an American company in voter registration for the 1968 elections had spawned a legacy of electoral malpractices, once described by Lord Avesbury, head of a UK Observers’ Mission, as “Something to Remember”.”
What needs to be emphasised, however, is that the “Cold War” is long over, and the Manichean thinking induced by communistic ideologies should now be jettisoned. For instance, the same “American imperialism” Nagamootoo flagellated facilitated the extraordinary success of the “Far Eastern Tigers”, which even Communist China has had to emulate. A social-economic and political system that can address Guyana’s peculiar challenges should now be adopted utilising the proven success of an appropriately regulated free enterprise system. This imperative is particularly necessary since Guyana is on the cusp of being a very significant oil producer that will generate very massive revenue streams compared to those of the previous hundreds of years.
But such a system can only work if it is acceptable to the majority of the Guyanese people, which then makes its ultimate success dependent on a political modus vivendi between the present PNC-led Government and the Opposition PPP to devise such a plan. It should be noted that only a single seat (5000 votes) separates the two political forces. It is for this reason that it was quite unfortunate that the CODEL was unable to meet the Political Opposition, as it did under similar circumstances in Albania last year.
In addition to a geographic overview, a strategic outline and an economic overview of Guyana, President David Granger offered a “political overview” to the delegation. He claimed, “Guyana is a very stable country, law-abiding country, and our National Assembly functions, our judiciary functions independently, and also the executive branch. So those three branches are separate, and the executive does not interfere in the judiciary or the autonomous commissions, like the Guyana Elections Commission, the Judicial Service Commission and so on. So I think, from the point of view of governance, we were able to explain that Guyana is a stable, well-governed state.”
While it is expected that the President would not criticise his own administration, even some of the members of his governing coalition have expressed reservations at one time or another with every element of his hagiographic account. By claiming, for instance that “the three branches (of Government) are separate” the CODEL would be excused for analogising their independent Legislature (which they represent) from ours, which is totally controlled by the Executive. The Ministers of Government appointed by the President, for example, are Members of Parliament.
For the President to tell the CODEL that “the executive does not interfere in the judiciary or the autonomous commissions, like the Guyana Elections Commission, the Judicial Service Commission, and so on”, is quite risible, to say the least. While it is likely the Opposition might also have been self-laudatory, by meeting them, CODEL would have been able to piece together a more nuanced narrative to further their “fact-finding mission”.
