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In a 2010 interview with Stabroek News, Dr. George Norton was asked to assess the PPP/C administration in relation to Amerindian development. He said it is obvious that during its almost two decades in office, some things were done but then proceeded to provide a snippet of the culture of permissiveness that pervades Amerindian/coastlander relations. He noted that in reality the Amerindian population was still vulnerable. ‘You still have Amerindian girls in the Chinese restaurants working under really bad conditions; you still have coastlanders going into the villages [and] bringing out Amerindian girls and putting them to work as domestics and they end up doing other things; you still have a high percentage of Amerindian children suffering from diseases that many Guyanese don’t, etc.’
At the time, Dr. Norton was head of the Guyana Organisation of Indigenous Peoples, a Member of Parliament and vice-chairperson of the main opposition PNCR. He later became a minister in the 2015 APNU+AFC government. He was responding to comments he made at the launch of Amerindian Heritage Month 2010 where he noted that the indigenous people, the majority of whom supported the PPP/C, were the most deprived ethnic group in Guyana, suffered from ‘mendicancy syndrome’ and should use their ‘swing vote’ capacity to put ‘themselves in a position where they can call the shots’.
Not surprisingly, then President Bharrat Jagdeo took issue with him on all counts, and during the interview Norton explained that Amerindian mendicancy was rooted in their poverty. ‘When you are going into a village where matches, soap and salt are luxuries, and you are gonna go in there and tell them you want them to support you and you ain’t bring nothing for them, then you got to be taking a lot for granted.’ To the president’s position that the racial divide should be played down, Dr. Norton responded that he (Jagdeo) was ‘burying his head in the sand’. Of course, if he was burying his head at all it was not in sand but in self-interest (‘Indigenous people could hold the ‘swing vote’ in next election -Norton. SN: 12/09/10)!
Except for a brief period during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the indigenous people were not considered the core constituency of any of the political parties seeking office. Indeed, I argued in ‘Amerindians need to develop their specific political organization and agenda’ (SN: 11/09/09) that the activities of the United Force during 50s and 60s were indicative of the kind of leverage Amerindians could now have if they were mobilized in their own interests.
No such distinct ethnic political approach exists and today, without an end in sight, the permissiveness continues, and the Amerindian people are the still the poorest and most disadvantaged ethnic group in Guyana. The conflagration at Mahdia that cost twenty young lives was clearly a government systems failure and that was almost immediately followed by accusations of the rape of a sixteen-year-old Amerindian girl by a minister of government and allegations of cover-up by the state and its agents. National outrage has resulted in the usual ineffectual calls for ‘us’ to hold the government accountable.
Unfortunately, there is no ‘us’ and we can expect that if an election is called tomorrow, the PPP will not lose a significant number of votes from its traditional supporters. That is not to say that they are unsympathetic but simply that they view the PNC as the greater danger. However, with its diminishing traditional support, the Amerindian vote and electoral manipulation have become more important to the PPP. While most Amerindians still vote for it, their votes are not as hardwired to it. After all, the PPP has been in government for 23 of the last 25 years, comparatively their economic conditions have not significantly improved and when this is coupled to the pervasiveness of the recent expressions of permissiveness, the PPP is as electorally vulnerable among this group as it has ever been.
What both Africans and Amerindians have in common is that for almost quarter of a century they have been disadvantaged by the present regime and they want immediate remediation. The United Nations Development Goals to which the government has committed provides a framework for action. For example, it calls on government to establish an economic floor bellowing which no Guyanese should fall, and now resources are available Guyanese should insist that this floor be established. Secondly, the same UN system has called for government to have and monitor policies to end ethnic disparities in a timely manner. In various associations, all Guyanese, but particularly those of Amerindian and Africans ethnicities, need to insist that the regime fulfill these commitments.
