Dear Editor,
This morning, I saw a PNC press release marking ten years since David Granger became President. It jolted me back to 2015.
Like many young Guyanese, I voted for him, convinced we were entering a new era. The phrase “It’s young people time now” was more than a campaign slogan – it became an ideal. An ideal we believed and wanted to be true. But we underestimated something powerful: institutional memory. And that rebranding doesn’t always mean reform. George Santayana captured this perfectly in his oft-quoted aphorism, “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
If only.
By 2011, the PNC rebranded itself under the guise of APNU and “big tent politics.” To many of us, it felt like a fresh start. But underneath the new logo and rhetoric was the same party, with the same instincts.
From 1968 to 1992, Guyana was ruled by the PNC under Forbes Burnham and later Desmond Hoyte. The PNC’s economic policies were aggressively anti-private sector, and, as it turned out, profoundly self-destructive. They nationalised all major industries – bauxite, sugar, rice, banking, distribution – and choked the economy with foreign exchange controls and import restrictions.
By 1979, the private sector had shrunk to just 10 per cent of GDP. Between 1976 and 1981, more than 70,000 Guyanese left the country (World Bank, 1992). According to Alister McIntyre’s 1989 report, Guyana had fallen below Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Inflation soared. External debt ballooned to over 500 per cent of GDP. The country was bleeding out.
As an aside, PNC apologists still lean on dependency theory, blaming imperialism for the collapse. But the facts are plain: while external shocks mattered, it was PNC policy, not geopolitics, that pushed us over the edge.
Now compare that to what countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan did in the same period. They also faced Cold War pressures, resource constraints, and postcolonial transitions. But instead of attacking markets, they invested in institutions. They saw enforceable contracts, secure property rights, and predictable tax systems as foundations for growth.
The PNC, meanwhile, treated those same ideas as anathema.
When APNU+AFC took power in 2015, it promised reform. But the echoes of the past returned fast.
Between 2016 and 2019, private-sector credit – one of the indicators of a healthy private sector – barely grew. While the period 2011 to 2015 saw a 60 per cent increase (an average of 12 per cent annually), APNU presided over a sharp slowdown, averaging just 4 per cent per year (Bank of Guyana Annual Reports, 2011–2019). This wasn’t the result of global headwinds or imperialist forces; it was the result of bad policy.
The coalition introduced over 200 new or reintroduced taxes and fees. Families saw VAT added to electricity, water, and even private school tuition. Not even the donkey cart man was spared. The Private Sector Commission called it “an assault on competitiveness” (Stabroek News, 2016). The closure of several sugar estates – done without meaningful transition plans – cost over 7,000 jobs and destabilised entire communities.
In tone and substance, this was not a new Government. It was the old PNC playbook, dusted off and put back to use. Aubrey Norton’s impassioned defence of import bans in Parliament earlier this year is a chilling reminder of just how dusty (and still in use) the playbook really is.
The PNC’s history of electoral fraud—1968, 1973, 1980, 1985—is well documented. Yet, many of us somehow believed 2015 marked a break from that legacy.
The 2020 election taught us differently.
The now-infamous spreadsheet scandal, the Region Four results manipulation, and the prolonged refusal to concede made one thing clear: the instinct to rig hadn’t disappeared – it was simply looming in the shadows – waiting on the curtain call. CARICOM’s observer mission didn’t mince words. The recount “revealed significant irregularities clearly designed to favour APNU+AFC” (CARICOM Report, 2020). Likewise, Bruce Golding, former Jamaican Prime Minister and OAS mission head famously quipped “this was the most transparent attempt to alter the results of an election.”
But the question isn’t just how this happened, but why so many of us let it.
Part of the answer is that we were never taught our post-independence political history with the seriousness it deserved. Many of us didn’t know what the PNC’s economic model looked like — or how deeply it failed. So when APNU+AFC re-emerged with (somewhat) younger faces and slicker branding, we mistook that for transformation.
Here are some truths I have learned. Rebranding without reform is deception. Economic policy without respect for the private sector is sabotage. And elections without integrity are not elections at all. Above all, George Santayana’s warning remains profoundly relevant: forgetting history does not make us progressive—it makes us vulnerable.
Yours sincerely,
Alfonso De Armas
