“When a group of persons live with a goal, an ideal, a mission, and look upon a particular piece of land as motherland, this group constitutes a Nation.”
It had been conceded that, at Independence, we had inherited a “state” but not a “nation”. We were a “land of six peoples”, that had been formed not out of some hoary past, like India, but thrown together by the Dutch, and then the British, with just one aim – to provide the cheapest labour possible to extract the wealth of Guyana for the “mother country”. Unfortunately, the Europeans were the worst caricature of the “evil stepmother” when it came to the needs of her “children”.
But one would have hoped that, after fifty-plus years of independence, we would have progressed a bit further than what we are presently witnessing towards becoming a nation: where one political party can call for the armed forces to turn their guns on one group of fellow Guyanese. And this was done in the presence of the Opposition Leader without the suggestion being unambiguously rejected. Why is this so? One reason is because we have been attempting to apply various foreign “isms”, with their operational institutions, without first having a clear understanding of the nature of our society. Fundamentally, because of our history, Guyana was a classic “plural society”, as described by the eminent Jamaican Anthropologist MG Smith. Our challenge is all matters is to deal with our immanent diversities.
Take the structure of the state and its governance institution we had been given by the British, along with the ideology of Liberalism to govern it. Sir Arthur Lewis, the West Indian Nobel Prize winner in economics, had in 1964 addressed the needs of plural societies after his experience in West Africa. Very pithily, he said this could be summarised as “Federalism” and “coalitions”. His advice, however, was ignored, even though he was made Chancellor of UG in 1965, and helped draft the PNC’s 1972-1976 Five Year Development Plan. The plan failed as much for not addressing the ethnic divisions in the country as anything else: the peoples did not feel they were all on a common mission.
The post-Independence PNC quickly jettisoned the ideology of liberalism for another foreign “ism” – “socialism” – which they tried to fob off as “indigenous”, but cogged wholesale from Tanzania’s “Ujama socialism”. The PNC augmented all the state institutions the British had used to govern the polyglot society with an iron fist – a tightly controlled centralised bureaucracy, an armed Police Force to which was now added an army from the disbanded “Volunteer Force”; Militia, National Service and other militarised bodies.
Throughout its reign, British had implemented a policy of “divide and rule” through a policy of differential recruitment into the armed forces. Rather than reversing this policy, as had been recommended by an International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in 1965 as part of the Independence package, the PNC Government increased the size of the armed forces, and the proportion of African Guyanese, who just happened to be their supporters. Not surprisingly, other groups were alienated from these state institutions – as they were from the Central Government – and were never conferred the legitimacy necessary for their integrative functioning and the country’s progress.
A Disciplined Forces Commission in 2004 made recommendations that were finally ratified unanimously by Parliament in 2010. Inter alia, it addressed the issue of the composition of the GDF: “With regard to manpower, the Commission recommended that recruitment procedures should have a particular focus on the Indian-Guyanese community, because of its general disinclination to join the Force; this should not be done to the neglect or exclusion of other ethnic groups. The Force should adopt recruitment procedures which must take into consideration cultural, sociological and psychological imperatives designed to attract Indian-Guyanese in particular to the GDF.”
Unless we confront the realities of our society, opportunistic politicians will continue to exploit what they consider to be advantages in our institutions, until the latter are refashioned to preclude those advantages.
