Dear Editor,
The intent of this letter is not simply a rebuttal to the opportunist outcry by those in power and out of power who are shedding crocodile tears since Dr David Hinds’ appropriate description of Africans who joined the PPP despite its racist and apartheid policies designed to enslave our community – “lick beet Africans”. Instead, my engagement is putting in the public record my unwavering support for Dr David Hinds and his description of African collaborators.
Guyana is at a crossroads, and those treating the political situation as normal politics and democracy are either fools by choice or design. Fortunately, the vast majority of Africans are not fools and have long been aware that the PPP is out to subjugate the African community to its political domination by “economic strangulation”.
Comrade Lincoln Lewis coined the term “economic genocide” many moons ago. The present condition of Africans in a major way is the consequence of the PPP policy resulting in Africans owning less than 10% of the economy. Adding to our marginalization in this period of oil money and plenty, the PPP/government is using the nation’s oil money to have our people lining up begging bowls, for the PPP’s Jim Jones “Kool-Aid”.
Yes! We are faced, with an “existential” threat to our survival as an African community. In this context, we are in a political war, not the normal election engagement. We know what happened in this contestation will determine the faith of generations of Africans and by extension, the Guyanese nation.
Our choice is to either surrender or resist our history and traditions makes surrender not an option. Fight we must use all the tools at our disposal, among those are language and rhetorical skills not new in Guyanese politics. Our creole culture and creolese as an aspect of it has given us many words to describe low life and undignified behaviour, such as “kissing ass”. We all know that in this context “ass” means beet. And this is a daily usage, in the African and wide Guyanese communities.
Why this opportunist cry? Forces like ANUG with no history of defending or demonstrating solidarity with Africans in our long struggle with the PPP and its apartheid policies reduced the African community to economic fringe. They lack credibility and should get out of African business. We demand the space to engage in tough love and self-criticism. Where were their voices when the Guyana government told the UN committee that the African condition was a result of self-inflicted wounds – in response to IDPADA-G submissions?
What African leaders and activists in this hostile environment choose to speak to our people on matters of our liberation is Africans’ business. It is our destiny that is on the line, our liberation. If our people succumb to the PPP entrapment, these very critics will laugh at us while drinking expensive liquid joking, at our collective shame.
Some people have a short memory of Africans, and their leaders/leadership have often been called to take responsibility for individual or collective shortcomings, and we have answered the call. We will do everything in our power to ensure that Africans don’t sell or trade their vote contributing to their demise. The question I posed above is why now? The answer is Hinds and the WPA have thrown a spanner in the political wheels of the PPP and those in support of PPP and Indian domination in Guyana. They and their acolytes are also using this issue with Dr Hinds trying to avoid the scrutiny of Transparency International that has exposed the level of corruption of the PPP state.
Professor Clive Thomas reminded us at the last WPA Executive meeting, that once the youth of a people buy into selling/trading their votes for political, economic and social favours, people are lost. The meaning and value of the vote are gone forever – and impossible to retrieve.
Those preparing to take Dr. David Hinds before the Ethnic Relations Committee (ERC) should also prepare to take me. I declare in the name of the ancestors that those African collaborators who are willing to trade their vote to the PPP, supporting that party efforts subjugate our community to a new form of enslavement, are – ” lick beet Africans”. I say to ANUG, let the struggle be waged in and out of the walls of the ERC. They can’t find Mr. Ivor Thom’s offender but will find Hinds and Ogunseye.
Your truly,
Tacuma Ogunseye
