World Bank on polarization

By GHK Lall

The midweek editions of Guyana’s independent media channels literally crackled with the conclusion of the World Bank on the state of things in Guyana.  Ethnic and political polarization is a huge problem for Guyana’s development.  With regard to the tender wording of the World Bank, I go deeper: ethnic and political polarization is killing us, leaving us naked and prostrated before all comers, all passersby.

Engage the PPP, and it points to the PNC.  Reach out to the PNC, and it wags a finger at the PPP.  Each is adamant that it is the other that is hateful, divisive, and lethal to Guyana’s development.  As I have observed this country for three score plus years now, there is some truth in the claim and counterclaim of both major political parties.  It is just a matter of degree.  It does not matter who has been more contributory to Guyana’s polarization longer; what matters today is who is capable of, and guilty of, doing it in a slicker, wider, manner.

We currently live with this harsh, remorseless unreality: Guyana has enormous oil patrimony, but hand in hand with that is the immense social poverty, with which too many Guyanese are forced to contend with, through dreary and gritty circumstances.  To repeat the oft repeated, because our population is so small, and the oil wealth is so gargantuan, relatively speaking, there should not be one Guyanese, who is yearning for equity from his or her patrimony.  I have spoken, from time to time, of the haves and the have nots in this society now gushing with torrents of oil.  It is more relevant today, far more accurate and timelier, to identify who gets and who doesn’t.

There is a certain distinctive strain, in the main, to those left on their own.  If someone said that such is a product of our racial and political polarization, then they are onto something that speaks its own infallible truth.  The ruling PPP political group is most familiar with this, the consequences accruing from the dictates of its hands.  This is with proper consideration for the plentiful platitudes that fail to wash away the inequities, and the injustices that they wreak so wantonly.  Besides fanciful speechmaking the leaders in the PPP Government are content to let the good times roll by.  To the benefit of some of its people, to the detriment of many of those it considers to be the most dreadful opponents, to the impediment of genuine national development, like the World Bank concluded.  The extent and impressive nature of what national development ought to be, given what is ours, has been thoughtlessly squandered on the altars of the paramountcy of ethnicity, and that of rancorous, raging political polarization.  In Guyana race is politics, and politics is race, and whether one or two, the great mass of Guyanese survive with one foot in the gutter, and the other on a roller-skate to oblivion.