Violent incitement: Sociological facts and political reality

By Freddie Kissoon

If anyone from a faroff country that never heard about Guyana was listening to Tacuma Ogunseye’s advocacy of the African overthrow of the PPP Government with the urging of support of what Ogunseye referred to as the African-dominated security forces, then only one thought would have crossed his/her mind.
It would have been that there is an exclusive Indian government representing 80 percent of the ethnic demography of Guyana, and that Government was an unelected oligarchy pursuing graphic oppression of a minority ethnic community.
There is one sociological dimension that the foreign listener would have not known about, and a political reality that they would never believe existed in Guyana. We will deal with the political reality first.
The man named Tacuma Ogunseye, who stood on a canter truck last week reeling off exhortations of African attacks on the Government, and the man named David Hinds, who supports his racist extremism, both belong to a political party that just a mere two and a half years were in power in Guyana.

 

The foreign listener would get a heart attack if and when they know this. The party of Ogunseye and Hinds were in power, with three of the WPA’s powerful leaders holding huge chunks of power and Mr. Ogunseye and other second tier leaders in the WPA exercising subordinate power themselves.
And while the WPA were in power from May 2015 to July 2020, vast jurisdictions of the state authority were used against the Guyanese people. African youths from Sophia where jailed for the mere possession of two grams of marijuana.
The 2015 campaign promise by APNU and WPA and the AFC to amend the draconian legislation, which was drafted by Mr. Nigel Hughes and put on the Parliamentary Order Paper, was cancelled. Taxi drivers, a substantial amount of whom are Africans, were not allowed to purchase used tyres, whose importation was banned.
There was a gargantuan rise in license fee for horse-drawn vehicles, a majority of which come from Sophia, where Mr. Ogunseye lives. The WPA, Hinds and Ogunseye have not apologized to African Guyanese to date. If any Government from 2015 was oligarchic, it was the regime that Ogunseye and Hinds served.
This Government, in one swoop, retrenched 7000 sugar workers, destabilising in the process the lives of 42,000 persons in the sugar estate communities. The 7000 ex-employees had to take Mr Ogunseye’s Government to court to receive monies that were legally due.
We could go on, but let’s move on to sociology. It is ironic that Ogunseye will be charged for his dangerous and illegal racist incitement. Why is it ironic? Because African Guyanese will not listen to Ogunseye, whom the young population of Guyana does not know about.
Ogunseye chose Buxton to deliver his racist diatribe. Why Buxton, when Georgetown has around 200,000 citizens, most of whom are African Guyanese? The answer is simple. He and Hinds would have had a poor attendance if they had located their meeting in South Ruimveldt, Charlestown, Lodge, Roxanne Burnham Gardens, or any district south of Princes Street in Wortmanville and Werk-en-Rust.
Why the attendance would have been poor? Because the sociology that Ogunseye and Hinds portray to African Guyanese does not exist. It exists only in the dangerous imagination of fantasists who have become irrelevant in a country with one of the world’s largest oil discoveries, for which the country is reaping immense benefits.
It was the WPA stalwart Clive Thomas, on a social media programme with David Hinds, who said that with the oil economy, there will now be some measure of poverty alleviation, but he is sad because such an economy has fallen into the hands of the PPP.
So Ogunseye’s leader has admitted that Guyana now has money to spend on the long elusive dream of the Guyanese people. Anyone who comes from another planet and looks down on Guyana’s sociology and how African Guyanese go about their business will be forced to conclude that the advocacy of the ethnic overthrow of the Government is dangerous fantasy at work.
There is no industrial action in years from any African- dominated trade union. There is no industrial action in years from the African- dominated Public Service. The University of Guyana, an African-dominated institution, has not engaged in ethnic denunciations.
There have been countless grounding sessions with African villages by President Ali that have resulted in formidable transformation of the economies of those villages. Peruse the 2023 edition of “Who Is Who in Guyana’s Business” and you will see the proliferation of an African professional middle class and the making of an African business community.
The enemies are at the gates alright, but they are a tiny bunch. They are a sad nihilistic reversion to a bygone age. Last time I checked, Guyana was living in the 21st century in the year 2023.