The drumbeat from the Opposition, ever since their fingers were pried from the levers of national office when they tried to hold on to power by using bedsheets and spreadsheets to rig the 2020 elections, was that the PPP government was only helping one section of the populace – their supporters, whom they insisted was only from one ethnic group. They went so far as to insist that the PPP government had actually established an “apartheid regime” here.
Apartheid, of course, is a form of governance legally institutionalizing an official racial stratification that places groups in the society in a racially-stratified hierarchy – paradigmatically in South Africa with Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom, and others in intermediate positions. Now, while a society might be stratified in one form or another, it is the official imprimatur by the state that, for instance, mandates segregated living areas that characterize apartheid. In Guyana, there are no such laws; and, in fact, if individuals are discriminated against on the basis of race, there are laws that the Courts can enforce.
Horizontal inequalities are inequalities among groups with a shared identity. Historically, our colonial state of six peoples was premised on the Europeans enjoying a much higher standard of living than the others. Over time, depending on many complex factors, the other groups also developed differentially. For instance, Mixed and Africans vied for the Government services and dominated them, while Portuguese, Chinese and Indians gravitated into private endeavours. The Indigenous Peoples generally languished on the economic periphery. This led to a certain level of horizontal inequality that persists into the present. The question is what can be done by the Government to create a more equitable society.
Three distinct approaches to the management of Horizontal Inequalities can be identified, and the present Government of Guyana can be seen to be utilizing all of them in its Budgets, including the one that was just presented for 2025, to create a new One Guyana. The first are direct approaches which involve targeting groups directly — for instance, using quotas/ targets for the allocation of jobs or educational access when it can be shown that they have historically been discriminated against. While the direct approach can obviously have an almost immediate effect, especially in the short term, as we have seen from the American experience, it risks increasing the salience of identity difference and antagonising those who do not benefit from the policy, since they might contest claims of lagging performance being due to historical discrimination. In Guyana, even though Indigenous Peoples have been historically left out of the coast-centred development, resentment has been fostered by the Opposition of programmes targeting towards them.
The second are indirect approaches, which involve general policies which have the effect of reducing group disparities overall, and not specifically targeted. These include, for example, progressive taxation, anti-discrimination policies, regional expenditure policies, or decentralization of power. These policies eschew narrow targeting and are much less likely to increase the salience of identity, but they may be less dramatic in reducing Horizontal Inequalities. In the Budget, for instance, we see a wide range of these programmes scattered through the gamut of economic activities and governmental programmes, such as building infrastructure in all regions and using local contractors.
Finally, the third type of approach can be labelled ‘integrationist’. In this case, the aim of policies is not so much to target Horizontal Inequalities per se, but to seek to reduce the salience of group boundaries. An integrationist approach involves, for example, promoting a national identity and shared economic or political activities across identarian lines. These are effective in reducing the salience of group boundaries.
The Government has unfurled its overarching goal of creating a One Guyana where all the peoples can see themselves as part of a mosaic. The spending on Education, Culture and Sports, for instance, has ballooned over the past five years, and we can already see the results expressed by youths in renouncing the Opposition’s only stressing racial identities.
