By Ryhaan Shah
Fifty-two years after gaining our independence from Britain, Guyana has nothing to celebrate. Birthed in the brutalities of colonialism, then dragged through three decades of the terrors of the PNC dictatorship, the country has suffered mass migration and periods of economic ruin and social depredations that have not allowed for any continuous period of progress and development.
When the PPP/C Government won the first free and fair elections in decades in 1992, they inherited a country with an enormous external debt-to-GDP ratio of 951 percent. By 2014, that Government reduced the debt to 44 percent through good fiscal management and sound economic policies, and the country was registering steady GDP growth.
Instead of following and improving on this progressive trend, the Granger Government has chosen to roll back projects and programmes in what appears to be a strategy driven by nothing more than political spite and vengeance against the PPP and its supporters.
The Specialty Hospital and Amaila Falls Hydro projects were scrapped for no good reason. They could have benefited the ailing health and power supply sectors respectively; and the Granger Government has established no major state infrastructural programme that would have created jobs and injected much needed cash into the economy.
Government is currently overseeing a shrinking economy, which is not surprising, since it has put well over 10,000 people out of work. It started with the retrenchment of 2,000 First Nations Community Support Officers and continued with the firing of hundreds of public servants, mostly Indian Guyanese. Then came the closure of three sugar estates and the retrenchment of over 5,000 sugar workers, again mostly Indian Guyanese.
A quarterly Labour Force Survey done between July and September 2017 shows an unemployment rate among men of 9.9 percent; and for women, an even higher rate of 15.3 percent.
The current youth unemployment sits at a record-breaking 21.6 percent – that’s nearly a quarter of the youth population. All the young hopefuls who went out to “vote like a boss” for the APNU/AFC Coalition find that none of the campaign promises of jobs that were to come from a flock of eager new investors has been fulfilled.
With a flat economy and high unemployment, it is not surprising that crime has risen to such a level that, relative to Guyana’s population size, it is higher even than the crime rate in the USA. This according to the Crime and Safety Report just published by the US State Department, which also describes Guyana’s medical services as “deficient”. The optics of the President and First Lady winging off to Trinidad this past week for their annual medical check-up bear out the truth of that statement.
The oil and gas are not yet flowing, but loans are being racked up at a fast rate, and Government’s raising of the debt ceiling to $50 billion per project means it can now take larger loans without having to inform the public. The inherent dangers of this move are obvious. Less public scrutiny could lead to even more state corruption than currently avails, especially when tied to Granger’s comments at the recent PNCR Congress: that his Government faces daily challenges from “sections of the media”.
The PNCR has tried to walk back those comments with assurances that the party believes that free access to information is “an indispensable condition of a democratic society,” even though such assurances do not square with the sedition clause of the Cybercrime Bill.
One of the media houses that Granger appears to find a “daily challenge” is the Guyana Times. A “Page One Comment” published this week disclosed that this newspaper has received threats from purported agents of the Government.
With racism, corruption, contempt for the rule of law, and economic mismanagement already in place, comparisons between the Granger Government and the past PNC dictatorship cannot be avoided. Death threats and muzzling of the media would complete the Burnhamist “vision”.
The independence anniversary always comes as a grim reminder of the Wismar Massacre, when Indian Guyanese were ethnically cleansed from the Wismar/Mackenzie area in violence that raged between May 23rd and 25th 1964. A New York Times report noted that, on May 26th, 1300 “Indians driven from their homes by Negroes during 36 hours of racial violence in the Mackenzie mining district” arrived in Georgetown on two river steamers.
Burnham chose May 26th as the date for independence two years later, over Dr Cheddi Jagan’s objections. The victims and survivors of the Wismar Massacre must never be forgotten; and we, the citizenry, must stand against such violence ever being visited on Guyana again.
