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Social activist, criminologist and host of the ‘Straight Up’ programme, Mark Benschop is speaking out on what he calls a concerted effort by the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) regime, covetous individuals and greedy businesses, to rob African Guyanese of their land wealth.
Speaking with Village Voice, Benschop says it is obvious the agenda of the PPP, is to target primarily landowners of African descent, those who have prescriptive rights to land, and those who leased from the state, so they can hand the land over to their supporters and their kind of businesspeople. This is wrong, says the activist. “Folks should stand up and fight against this because it’s totally unacceptable what people are going through.”
There is a plethora of cases, some reported in Village Voice, of individuals who have bonafide documentation of lands up on the West Bank of Demerara (WBD), Soesdyke-Linden Highway, including transport of ancestral lands, and have been crying foul at efforts to claim their lands by government or others.
Persons in the Wales community-i.e., a combination of villages on the WBD, so referred because they supplied the Wales Sugar Estate with canes- as early as September 2020 began receiving eviction notices from the PPP. The Court in September 2020 ruled against the government. The government has since the ruling, through actions of non-maintenance of the roads and bridges from the farms to the main roads, deprived persons access to their farms, resulting in wastage of what could have been their harvests.
According to Benschop, “shortly after the PPP was installed in office, they started to charge individuals such as the former CEO of Lands and Surveys, Mr. Trevor Benn, and to this day they have absolutely no evidence of him doing any wrong, other than to distribute lands in a very legal way and equitable manner to everybody.” He sees the charge against Benn and others as “the modus operandi of the PPP to deprive persons of African descent of ownership of land throughout the country.” This he says, has to be stopped, one way or the other.
It is racism, he said, and this is why the description of the regime being an apartheid regime is quite applicable based on these evidence, charges the activist.
The United Nations (UN), speaking to the issue in the ‘Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,’ notes: “’racial discrimination’ shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”
Addressing issues of racism and apartheid recently, UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres said, whereas “[t]oday, apartheid lies dead…[m]uch of today’s racism is deeply entrenched in centuries of colonialism and enslavement. We see it in the pervasive discrimination and exclusion suffered by people of African descent…. But, sadly, racism lives on — in all regions and in all societies.
“Racism manifests in many forms – conscious and unconscious. Combatting it demands action every day, at every level. It is especially important to recognise that historical injustices have contributed to poverty, underdevelopment, marginalisation, social exclusion and instability for both people and countries alike.”
Benschop feels in recognition of the sad situation and threat to land wealth, the Opposition needs to be stronger in every area in order to combat the advantage taken of the people. Whoever is the shadow minister of housing should be taking the names of persons the regime is taking away their lands and file a class action lawsuit, he advises. However, this alone will not suffice, says the activist.
“We also need competent lawyers who wouldn’t play double-sword games with the people and participate in a diabolical conspiracy to grab lands away from people and hand it over to big vicious businessmen, some of whom are questionable, so we’ve got to be careful with some of the lawyers as well.”
Presently there is a case in the court where the rightful owners, of 143 acres of land in Beterverwagting, East Coast Demerara, are being taken to court by a businessman for their land, which was wrongly sold by the Chairman of the Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC).
Chairman Jummaul Bagot subsequently acknowledged the Council did not have the authority to sell the land and sought to repay the purchaser, John Fernandes Limited’s (JFL). JFL transferred its interest in the arrangement to Mohamed Sons and Daughters Trading. The information of resale only came to light when JFL returned a cheque to the NDC for the $20 million refund.
Mohamed does not want to return the land and has taken the NDC to court. The company wants the court to order the release of the land once it would have paid the balance of the $35 million purchase price as originally agreed between the NDC and JFL. Mohamed is being represented by Hughes, Fields and Stoby Law Firm.
The problems of coveting ancestral land and seizing land from persons who have lawful possession have intensified with the PPP return to government.