Dear Editor
WPA continues to closely monitor the developments since the PPP’s elevation to the seat of government. After two weeks we have not seen any signs of the promised break with the ills of the past. The new government in place continues firmly in transition mode, even as Guyana’s electoral and political crises rage. The aspect of these crises which most alarms WPA is that the “electoral victory”, in essence, signifies so far, the “successful rebirth and resurgence” of the criminal state. We believe this rebirth and resurgence are both a testimony to the poor performance of executive governance by the Coalition Government, and to the synergistic combining of external actors and interests with certain internal civil, economic, and political interests.
At this point of time, the WPA cannot definitively determine the relative importance of these two factors. As a multiracial political party, certain markers stand out though. One is that the rebirth and resurgence have generated overt and covert racial insecurity and animosity of an unprecedented intensity, albeit there has been, thankfully, thus far, no public eruption. It nevertheless remains a flashpoint.
The racial hysteria daily portrayed on social media has been intense, if not manic. The hysteria has been fueled by the total consolidation of all the daily print media in Indian Guyanese hands. The Chronicle is now indisputably the organ of the new governing party. This consolidation causes great anxiety about the right of African Guyanese to portray how they interpret their reality. Take a couple of examples of great concern to them. African Guyanese have seen during these crises that, the print media have rightfully and righteously castigated the African Guyanese leader of a new political party for clearly unacceptable predatory behavior against young women. While this was taking place, leading Indian Guyanese men, remained without public rebuke, even though they are long known for beating women and children in the public square; traders of “benefits” for sexual favors from students as well as predators of indigenous Guyanese female youth. These same men continued unabashedly to pontificate on public morality. attacking prominent African Guyanese men based on their preferred access to the Indian Guyanese owned and controlled media houses. This has been the distasteful reality in what we call Guyana civil society today!
This is not WPA exaggeration. Shamefully it occurs in other arenas, not only cultural ones. Consider the almost daily sniping and attacks on the two most highly professional African Guyanese who head our largest Oil and Gas Agencies. They face an array of sloganeering from big-oil “expert” critics… Every one of these so-called big oil experts and critics, men and women, share two common characteristics. One is that they have previously worked for years with big oil. They have received their pensions and/or their “leaving entitlements” and now today are celebrated in our print media as anti-big oil protagonists. The other characteristic is that not one of these experts is African Guyanese. The sophistry is astounding! WPA raises these issues precisely because they represent an uncomfortable truth which it is not prepared to hide. Too many Guyanese whisper about those publicly un-acknowledged inequities, which, are aided and abetted by the hirelings of the daily Indian-Guyanese print media monopoly.
Finally, WPA cautions that, the resurgence of the criminal state threatens to bring two further inequities to the fore. One is that the pursuit of thieving everything that can be “safely” stolen from the State will no doubt be rebirthed. The other is that Guyana’s national patrimony and national budgets will continue through the Government to prioritize constituents of the governing PPP/C.
Regards
Working Peoples Alliance
