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I am a staunch supporter of diaspora political interventions to help solve Guyana’s intractable political impasse, and as best it can, the opposition should closely monitor and try to forewarn proposed participants of these arrangements. Poor preparation will be on the side of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), who will present visiting delegations with all manner of false generalities with the main objective of casting doubt on the entire process. After all, there is no specific database to facilitate comparative scientific assessment about the development of ethnic disparities in Guyana, and the PPP, set upon the furtive imposition of ethnic/political dominance over the last quarter of a century, wallows in this kind of uncertainty.
On the 30th of September 2023, the Guyana Chronicle stated that ‘The delegation hopes to foster co-operation and dialogue between the Government of Guyana and the Guyanese Diaspora within the State of New York and at the Federal Level.’ Recently we were told that what was being called a ‘fact-finding mission’ was not: ‘This was not a fact-finding mission … We are just here to talk to different people and that is what we have been doing. When we go back, we will talk to our fellow partners, our New York [state] legislators. We do not influence policies in other countries, that’s for the federal government. We are just here to meet with anyone we had the time to meet with’ (SN:02/11/2023).
The New York delegation may not have been a ‘fact-finding mission’ in the formal and narrow sense of that term, but its timing, mission, and access might have allowed some to view it as a politically manufactured counterpoint to the recent diaspora meeting between the opposition and members of the United States Congress. It is good that this is not so, and one is now assured that when they return and ‘talk to (their) fellow partners’ on issues having to do with Guyana they will present the facts and not fiction.
For me, the various diaspora interventions should facilitate concrete outcomes that help to create a more inclusively democratic society, and given the size of the two major contesting ethnic groups, if there is to be a serious discourse and policies established to deal with the ethnic conflicts, the claims of race/ethnic disparities will have to be addressed. Hopefully, here the diaspora can use their influence with their governments to, among other things, get the Guyanese authorities to understand their responsibility to collect, document, and properly publish disaggregated ethnic data as demanded by the United Nations and to which any Guyanese in any part of the world could have access.
It is something of a shame that a country that has for three generations been locked in racial/ethnic antagonisms with claims and counterclaims of systemic discrimination has not established processes to systematically collect analyze and publish data that can allow, even a visitor from Mars, to properly assess the situation. On the contrary, the PPP cloaks itself in the kind of universalist/assimilationist conceptual framework that allows it to speak in generalities when Guyana’s situation demands the identification of specific difficulties and remedies. PPP politicians boast about not collecting data based on ethnicity as if to suggest that this means the ethnic problems do not exist or that the unavailability of such data will aid in the solution to the problem.
Others have argued, and since 2013 using the available data, I have been arguing, that the PPP drive towards ethnic/political dominance was relatively successful largely because it was being implemented and that there is not a single area in African social life that the PPP has not sought to dominate or suppress. The town of Linden and the deliberate destruction of the Bauxite pension fund that is considered the largest sum of money owned by African Guyanese; the Georgetown City Council that the government continues to starve of funding; the Guyana Trade Union Council, the Public Service Union, the Guyana Teacher Union (comparatively teachers and I suspect all public servants’ salaries have been significantly reduced). But with the growing national and international realization of its goal, time is not on the PPP’s side and it is now going after the People’s National Congress (PNC) which represents the vast majority of ethnic Africans.
As a cover for this project, the PPP has claimed that it is developing a ‘new’ kind of democracy. They are bypassing the PNC’s constitutional representatives and going directly to the African people. The strategy is to try and win the support of the African lumpen proletariat that its policies have impoverished the most! Of course, the bottom fell out of this tomfoolery when the Venezuelans massed troops at the border, and real politics – the need for national unity -kicked in and had the PPP scampering to the PNC! In the context of political dominance, this does not send the message of its invincibility and so having negotiated and obtained the support of the PNC, it is now reneging on the agreements, perhaps hoping that once locked into the unity fold the PNC will find it difficult to leave!
In a plural society, it is likely that social and economic disparities can deliberately or accidentally develop. As USA’s Department of the Treasury noted: ‘Systemic racism is the complex interaction of culture, policy, and institutions that holds in place the outcomes we see in our lives, … (and) leads to disparities in wealth, health, criminal justice, employment, housing, political representation, and education. … It is important to note that while we have reliable measures and data sources to define the differences in many outcomes between racial and ethnic groups over the past forty years, our ability to trace racial inequality back further and examine the country’s progress since the end of slavery is limited by the quality and quantity of data available.’
One only needs to Google ‘racial disparities in the USA’ to grasp the range and depth of work that has been done in the USA and needs to be done here, to realize that there is no data source in Guyana. Given the importance of this matter to national development it is the duty of governments to facilitate its development. I am not interested in the turpitude of the PPP’s oligarchs: politics corrupts, and a political system must be capable of dealing with the amoral and the corrupt. The crux of Guyana’s political reality is that it does not have this capability and at some point, this will also have to be addressed.
Given the political/ethnic trajectory of the PPP, getting the PPP to establish such a database will not be easy because its existence will seriously diminish the PPP’s capacity to marginalize and subvert the other ethnic groups. Note too that racial/ethnic voting and the manipulation of elections is so pervasive that the national census that provides associated data and is scheduled to be published around a specific date every ten years can suspiciously materialize only years later! As with the Auditor General’s Office, therefore, any arrangement to provide ethnic data – indeed even the existing Bureau of Statistics that is responsible for the national census – should be within the remit of a National Assembly Public Accounts-type arrangement and not the executive government.
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