Ruing… Independence

So tomorrow, we’re celebrating Independence Day – May 26. Your Eyewitness knows that this year, because it’s the 60th anniversary all the stops have been pulled out since it’s a nice, round number!! But if we’re going back to the beginning in 1966 – and your Eyewitness was there as a wee lad! – we gotta ask, “What was there ever to celebrate??” That Fat Boy sold out his country by conniving with the Yanks and Brits to remove a democratically elected government and then call it “democracy”?? So democracy’s a game where you can change the rules in the middle of the game to deliver victory to the leader willing to betray his country?? That’s not cricket, innit?
Hasn’t this set the precedent for the PNC’s present imploded incarnation with their myrmidons demanding “shared governance”?? How we ever gonna have a stable political system when the colonial power showed the loser rules don’t really matter?? Should we celebrate the Kabaka splitting the unified national movement just to satisfy his megalomania?? Then left us so divided after independence we still haven’t come together 60 years later??
And then there’s the matter of the date chosen for independence – May 26. Why celebrate the day in which the first ethnic cleansing in the hemisphere was executed by the PNC at Wismar – leaving the Indian-Guyanese majority of the populace traumatized?? Didn’t that dastardly act ensure that while “independence” gave us a state we still haven’t become a nation?? Our independence was like that “fruit of the poisoned tree” lawyers carry on about!! Fiddled electoral arrangements to install the PNC in government?? So Burnham likewise fiddled around electorally for the next twenty-eight years to remain in office – and the ex-colonials winked at him??
Independence was supposed to deliver economic prosperity since the exploiters were now supposedly gone. So what happened?? Economic ruination happened, that’s what!! The Rice industry was destroyed to spite the PNC’s political opponents – Indian- Guyanese who supported the PPP. The sugar Industry was raped by a levy that scooped off the profits so that the mainly Indian- Guyanese workers couldn’t get their legally mandated share. Ironically, even the bauxite industry – which employed the PNC’s African Guyanese supporters – was destroyed since they insisted on employing their unqualified “own”!! Karma’s a bitch!! By 1989 we were certified as the second most poverty-stricken country in the hemisphere – hovering precariously above Haiti!
Your Eyewitness dares anyone to tell him what positive element there was in Independence!! The flag, anthem and motto?? The last just mocks us since we got neither a nation nor a people – just a common destiny of destitution. The roads built as payoffs for their betrayal??
So, your Eyewitness goes into mourning on “Independence Days”!

…not the recovery!!
They say time longer than twine – and the PPP was voted in back in 1992!! They’d been saddled with a US$2.1 billion external debt – THREE TIMES the entire GDP – and defined as a Highly Indebted Poor Country!! We were a poster boy of poverty in the western hemisphere – right alongside Haiti!! And the PPP has never been given credit for dragging us out of that hole through sheer will and grit – quickly becoming a Middle-Income country!! So those in the Opposition – including the PNC detritus – who complain about high poverty rates should reflect on what could’ve been!!
Yep!! The PPP defied the singularity of the black hole of debt – even as the PNC plunged our nation into an even greater carnage of violence that the one they’d unleashed in the sixties to get “Independence”!! Let’s give Jagdeo his jacket!!
And his successor Ifraan Ali is putting the finishing touches to the recovery – while simultaneously building the foundations for us to become a First World nation!!

…China’s claws
While the Indian workers from that quarry in the interior has (rightly) been in the news – the labour practices of Chinese to local hired Guyanese who have pretty much taken over the supermarket business have been uncommented on!!