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The PPP Government plans to distribute a subvention to 55 organisations that are the founding members the International Decade for People of African Descent Assembly-Guyana – IDPADA-G – (SN/15/04/2023). By their nature, the activities of IDPADA-G are anathema to the PPP goal of establishing ethnic/political dominance in Guyana, and it was only a matter of time before it attempted to denude it of resources. The objective of achieving the socio/economic subservience of Africans has only now become obvious but was hatched some two decades ago and has been vigorously but slyly been pursued by the PPP since then.
Perhaps the most direct, egregious but craftily executed example in this process was the PPP destruction of the bauxite industry’s self-contributing pension fund of more than $2.5 billion in the early 2000s. In the hands of any responsible government that had the interest of all Guyanese and the African people at heart, that fund could have been turned into substantial generational wealth to perennially serve the people of Linden and elsewhere.
Generational wealth consists of valuable assets that are passed down from one generation to the next and can include cash, real estate, family businesses, investments in stocks, bonds, insurance, pension funds, etc. It offers significant financial advantage to an individual, family or community as it can provided for scholarships, loans, the necessary managerial support for local business startups, housing, medical care, etc. Such wealth usually grows from investment in arrangements such as pension funds. Properly managed, the Linden fund would have helped hundreds, perhaps thousands of persons along the way and today be worth about $6 billion!
But read the following story and see what I meant when I said that the PPP goal is “The furtive establishment of political dominance’ (SN:17/04/2013). On 14 February 2023, in response to a claim by Mr. Lincoln Lewis that ‘Under Jagdeo’s Presidency … the single largest pool of money owned by African workers …. the bauxite industry self-contributing Pension Fund worth more than $2.5 Billion was destroyed,” former Prime Minister and now Ambassador, Samuel Hinds, explained thus.
‘The Bauxite Industry contributing Pension Fund was not destroyed but distributed to its members. President Jagdeo saved it from destruction by refusing to hand it over to Mr. Lincoln Lewis as Head of the Union and his associates. Our PPP/C Government’s position was that we had a legal and moral responsibility to hand the full benefit (employer and employee contributions as provided for in the pension fund rules) to every member of the pension fund. We said to Mr. Lewis and his colleagues that we can give each worker his cheque at one table and you can have a table nearby so that each worker could deposit it into your Fund as he or she may choose. It was for you, Mr. Lewis, to so persuade and commit to the workers.’
Assuming that it was not rooted in the usual racists propaganda about the management capacities of Africans, the government must have had good reason to feel that Lewis and his colleagues did not have the capacity to properly manage the fund. Surely it was not simply a matter of what the union wanted: a responsible government should have taken into consideration the then and future generations and utilized its capacity of oversight to ensure that proper arrangements were in place to manage the fund. Maybe somewhat different, but the government still managed the sugar industry labour welfare fund that, by way of a sugar levy, has for decades been doing infrastructural works on housing schemes for sugar workers. However, Lincoln lamented, ‘Every suggestion put forward by bauxite workers and their unions to create an investment plan from this Fund, that would ensure its continuity and a pension to workers at retirement, was ignored’ (SN: 20/01/2021)
Since the PPP has such faith in distributing resources to their primary owners, I recommend that it should take a referendum on a proposal that the total annual oil revenue, calculated to be about of about US$1.6 billion this year, should be divided equally among Guyana’s 800,000 citizens, giving each person about US$2,000 or G$400,000 per year, and then based upon their manifesto, the citizens must be equitably taxed by the politicians for the sum required to properly manage the country.
According to a view in the international financial community, if instead of the government controlling how oil revenues are spent the revenues are transferred directly to citizens, with government having to tax them to finance public spending, there will be two advantages for a democracy: ‘First, citizens will now know the magnitude of oil revenues. Second, they have a greater incentive to monitor how their tax money is being spent.’ (https://www. brookings.edu/blog/future- development/2017/02/15/three-reasons-for-universal-basic-income/). It will also significantly contribute to poverty alleviation and make party manifestoes and the political process more meaningful and interesting!
The attack on IDPADA, is similar to the destruction of bauxite workers pension fund, etc. They are aspects of a general attack upon the African capacity to confront obstacles and make substantial independent plans for their future. To ensure some support for the PPP, Africans have to be kept relatively poor so that they can be placed in red jerseys and herded down the street. After Cheddi Jagan, the totality of PPP experience in government forced it to make a choice between liberal democracy and autocracy and it chose to try to furtively implement the latter.
