There is no question that African Guyanese have been and are still being furtively badly disadvantaged in numerous ways under the PPP bent upon establishing political ethnic dominance. That is why of all the important topics discussed at the various levels of the recently concluded Second Session of the Permanent Forum on Peoples of African Decent that took place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the most important from the standpoint of Guyanese was that addressed by Dr Terrence Blackman ‘An Evidence-Based Approach to Recognising and Addressing Systemic and Structural racism: Data Collection for People of African Descent.’
Everywhere you turn in Guyana, Africans are being disadvantaged and the participants from IDPADA-G pointed to disadvantages in the areas of land distribution, the award of government contracts and gold, oil and other mineral concessions, participation in the business sector, etc. A few days ago, a letter from the Mayor of Georgetown outlined how the PPP government has been starving it of funds thus allowing the people of Georgetown to live in suboptimal conditions to force them to vote for it.
Take another surreptitious example. Particularly at the lower levels, Africans are most of the workers in the public sector and there has been a perennial quarrel between the government and the Guyana Public Service Union over remuneration. In 1992, a senior minister’s salary was about $23,000 per month and the minimum wage was $3,150 per month: about a x7 difference. Cheddi Jagan came to government in October 1992 with the notion that no one should get more than 10 times anyone else. In April 1993, he increased the minimum wage by some 46%, backdating it to nine months before he came to office. Cheddi died in 1997 and the minimum wage in 1998 was about $11,500: x3.7 what it was in 1992, and ministerial salaries at about $90,000 remained at about 7 times more than the minimum wage. With the death of Cheddi and the ousting of Janet Jagan as president, public sector wages policy changed.
On 19 November 2021, Kaieteur News reported that the salary of a minister (largely of the ruling party and its associates) was $929,830 and the minimum wage $74,900: a x12.4 difference. But more telling, between 1992 and 2020, the salary of a minister had increased 40.4 times while the minimum wage only increased x24. If the minimum wage had increased x40.4, in 2020 it would have been about $127,000! Some of what took place resulted from the usual political permissiveness but who gets hurt? Africans are largely in employment and the minimum wage for the private sector is even lower than the public sector!
At its First Session last year, Members of the Permanent Forum ‘affirm[ed] the urgent need for Member States to collect disaggregated data of people of African descent on race, sex, gender, age, geographic (rural/urban) location, employment, economic status: to identify, monitor, and track disparities and hold themselves accountable for the human right situation of people of African descent as well as for measurable Sustainable Development Goals, racial justice indicators and policy targets and reviewing the effectiveness and impact of policies and laws.’ Also, among the recommendations of that first Session, is a focus on the ‘development of official United Nations Guidelines and a Handbook for a comprehensive human rights-based and data-driven approach to recognising and addressing systemic and structural racism against people of African descent.’
Recognising that Africans were being systematically discriminated against over a decade ago, this column called on the PPP government to implement policies to establish equitability in all areas of social life (SN:29/06/2011). In ‘Ending African Inequality (VV: 15/08/2021) speaking to the coalition government, I pointed out that after riots in 1969, the incoming government of Malaysia understood that ‘National Unity is unattainable without greater equity and balance among Malaysia’s social and ethnic groups in their participation in the development of the country and in the sharing of the benefits from modernization and economic growth.’ I also indicated that upon demands for policies to deal with ‘the disproportionate outcomes for different ethnic groups in the UK in 2016, the government established a Racial Disparity Unit in the Prime Minister’s Office to direct and monitor the process. The first report published in 2017 showed large disparities between how people are treated depending on their race.
Of course, the regime denies that it discriminates and notwithstanding the UN’s request has called upon the complainants to find and present the evidence themselves. It then sends its representative to the above-mentioned Forum to convince the participants that since Guyana has laws that protect individual human rights it has good practice, when it is universally accepted that good laws do not mean good practice, and Guyana is considered an elected democracy veering towards autocracy largely because it is archetypical of bad practice.
In our times, democracy and the rule of law are so mutually reinforcing that they appear to be synonymous. There are narrow conceptions of both: the former focuses on elections and pays little attention to the other political virtues, and the latter focus on rules and processes and can provide substantial levels of security and peace at the same time as allowing all manner of atrocities. The rule of law licensed the buying, selling, and keeping of human beings as slaves for centuries and thus today reparations are being sought and won to try and compensate for the injustices.
The best expression of human freedom and justice in our time is to be found in the broader conception of rule of law that sounds almost synonymous with democracy. ‘[A] principle of governance in which all persons, institutions, and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires measures as well to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of the law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness, and procedural and legal transparency (UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, 2004 reports on the rule of law).
Largely because of the absence of the factors referred to in the preceding paragraph, Guyana is classed as almost an autocracy. It assented to the Caribbean Court of Justice nearly two decades ago, yet if anything, the situation in relation to the above-mentioned broader conception of the rule of law has become worse not better. The Constitution is now being routinely broken, but even in the sphere of the courts themselves, fairness in the application of the law, particularly when it has to do with important political cases in which the regime has an interest, can become questionable. No amount of particularized subjective praise or criticism can mitigate the fact that the judiciary must not only be independent but must be seen to be independent, and this cannot be the case when, inter alia, since 2001 those at the pinnacle have been kept (currently because of their ethnicity) in acting positions that they can be maneuvered from at the whim of the executive. Like much else, the judicial system needs immediate reform.
‘National Unity (One Guyana) is unattainable without greater equity and balance among social and ethnic groups.’ If these claims of PPP’s racism, trying to establish an apartheid type state, etc., are untrue and the PPP is truly committed to fostering a united people, would it not long ago done the type of analysis recommended by the UN to establish the veracity of its contention? It’s refusal to do is because it cannot and this is the clearest indicator that matters not how utopian Cheddi Jagan’s vision of a prosperous and united Guyana was, it has long been dead!
The existing PPP has for some time been set upon establishing ethnic/political dominance in Guyana and has attempted to impoverish Africans to drive them into its ranks. So, when it comes with its pittance for one to clean drains and trenches, consider the quantities that are given elsewhere. Of course, take it if you must, but remember what eye-pass this represents when the PPP now asks Africans to give it another chance and aid in their further demise!
