By Ryhaan Shah
Not since “Burnham’s Guyana” has there been such a relentless onslaught on everything right, decent and lawful. Everyone who experienced those times cannot help but feel a sense of déjà vu. It is not just the state corruptions and contempt for the rule of law, but the strengthening of the army and the promised return of the People’s Militia. These are clear signs of a return to a militarised state.
The bias against Indian Guyanese, as under Burnham, is vengeful; and there appears to be no embarrassment or shame about the photographs, statements, and ethnic cleansing that underline the Granger Government’s policies and open favour of African Guyanese.
It is not a stretch to conclude that the PNC are acting from a long-held position that Guyana belongs to them and their supporters, i.e., to African Guyanese; and that every other ethnic group has less rights and legitimacy to Guyanese citizenship.
That attempt to make Africans indigenous by claiming that they arrived here even before those who are universally accepted as the First Peoples of the Americas was not being forwarded as a spurious claim, but was intended to question and even upend historical facts and data.
No other African people in the Caribbean or North and South America have questioned or tried to debunk the legitimacy of Americas’ First Peoples, their indigenous status, and any of their inherited rights. African Guyanese stand alone in this regard, and all the talk about social cohesion is empty rhetoric and a national distraction as Granger moves to solidify the PNC’s hold on the entire public service; and, through the dispensation of state funds and international aid, favour African Guyanese communities.
Aid and support to the tune of more than US$12 million by the Granger Government and the Caribbean Development Fund will be given to the villages of Ithaca, Triumph, Buxton and Mocha – largely African Guyanese villages – to help them revitalise agriculture.
On the face of it, helping to develop Guyana’s agricultural sector is commendable; but when the same Government has retrenched over 5,000 sugar workers, closed sugar estates, and is throwing rice farmers at Hope Estate off the land — all the affected workers and farmers being mainly Indian Guyanese – those other moves to boost agricultural development expose a clear racial bias.
Granger says his Government is trying to regain lost ground, and is helping communities neglected by the PPP/C Government; but pursuing a policy of “regaining lost ground” by wilfully creating jobless communities of mainly Indian Guyanese is unjust, and the move to reopen the Skeldon and Enmore sugar estates shows that shutting down the estates was never the result of a considered development strategy. It appears as an act of vengeance against perceived PPP supporters.
For too long, Guyana has been the victim of this tit-for-tat politics. Whatever ills the PPP/C did during its governance, it did hand over a civil service, Police Force and army that had not changed much since Burnham’s time. They were still staffed largely by African Guyanese, a status quo that is now being widened by Granger to include as many other sectors as possible.
Indian Guyanese have always been relegated to an ethnic minority status that belies their numbers in a region where African Caribbean culture and politics are dominant; and African Guyanese, via the PNC, continue to act from this position of dominance.
While we all emerged from a brutal colonial past, we have yet to rediscover that short-lived united front that was evident when we stood against colonialism and fought for our freedom. We continually betray that legacy of dignity and courage, and find ourselves shaping our own history of brutality, corruption and contempt as we scrap over “whose Guyana?”
Like all history, ours occurred on a continuum. It cannot be picked apart piecemeal, but is a legacy inherited by every citizen, whose story adds to the historical narrative. No one is an island because of the interconnectedness of the time continuum.
History also gives a measure of how far we have travelled, and how much still needs to be done; and Guyana’s post-independence fight for political domination along ethnic, partisan lines has created varying levels of distrust for our political leadership, which is yet to rise to the challenge and embody the hopes of this nation of peoples.
Perhaps there needs to be a seismic shift, and the real struggle should be to first accept the legacy that history has placed on us, and to establish and uphold a political system that would provide just governance of a richly diverse society of peoples, who each have talents and skills that can help build this country.
