Commentary
guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com
Posted
July 3rd. 2009
By Clarence Ellis
The
Honourable David Thompson
Prime Minister,
Barbados, West Indies.
Excellency,
I have been asked by Mr. Lincoln Lewis, Secretary of the Caribbean Congress of Labour, to address you on the complex issue of the remigration of Guyanese to Guyana. I was compelled to answer my colleagues on my e-mail list and have, in effect, reproduced my note to them as a letter to you. My purpose is to provide you with a brief with which you can deal with the matter comprehensively.
I am copying my letter to you to the Secretary General of CARICOM .
This issue of repugnant immigration practices by the Barbados Government is complex. It does not admit of any simple solution. As I see it there are 5 aspects that should be addressed. Each is complex in its own right. I itemise them at the beginning:
1. The incompetence of the Guyana Government.
2. The exploitation by the Barbadians of national sentiment at the expense of regional sentiment.
3. The loss of independence in the Caribbean civil service and , in this instance , in Barbados.
4. The lack of professionalism among the Caribbean officials speaking out against immigration injustice.
5. The inability of the Integration Movement to fulfill the expectations of the CSME.
1.The Incompetence of the Guyana Government
The underlying cause of the mistreatment of Guyanese in Barbados is the failure of the Guyana economy to provide work for its own people. The Guyana economy had recovered under Hoyte in the early 1990s but the PPP Govt., unmindful of the necessity to keep investments flowing into the economy, turned the investment spigot off when it rejected the donors' proposals for upgrading the quality of the civil service and when Cheddi Jagan rejected a reliance on foreign investment . He turned down the Kayman Sankar project. In respect of the public service, the rejection of the donors' approaches to attract well qualified public servants was inspired by Jagan's egalitarian principles and his desire to Indianise the management cadre of the civil service and senior officials of the Sugar Corporation.
The business community had signaled to Jagan that they would turn to narcotics if his dollar-a-day payment policies and his halt to foreign direct investments were not reversed. Jagan compounded the difficulty when his Government turned down an IDB loan to resuscitate the electricity industry. His alternative investments in electricity were very costly and depressed the opportunities for efficient manufacturing. The narcotics corruption began to take hold and the corruption of Jagan's closest advisers resulted, it is said, in his heart attack .
The ruthless Indianisation of the senior positions in the civil service and in the government corporations and the wanton destruction of the bauxite industry led Labour leader Lincoln Lewis to describe the situation as the economic genocide of Africans. The deterioration applied to all races as President Jagdeo assumed the presidency and refused to give priority to the maintenance of the country's infrastructure . The increasing influence of the narcotics industry was associated with extra judicial murders of hundreds of Guyanese, mainly Africans, as emphasis was given more to coercion than to persusion. Guyanese accordingly migrated in droves in search of a better life .
This search for employment is at the bottom of the migration problems in Barbados and it is disingenuous to ignore the root cause of the difficulties faced by the Barbadians.
2.The exploitation of national sentiment in Barbados at the expense of regional sentiment.
It is a difficult task to build national and regional solidarity at the same time, especially when regional solidarity is under the stress of migration as discussed above. Under colonialism , West Indians did have a regional sentiment. We could travel from territory to territory and present a British passport and enter the territory without any difficulty. We were not confused about regional identity. Then came the travails associated with West Indian Federation. I have written about the difficulties caused by race in reaction to the notion of Federation.
Caribbean people are confused about national solidarity in the divisive Westminster politics which polarises relations between political party contestants to the point where party political rivals are seen as bitter enemies. The British Westminster system works because the leaders of Labour and Conservative Parties can socialise over tea and lunch in a way that Prime Ministers David Thompson and Owen Arthur cannot.
Institutions are necessary to bridge differences in CARICOM. The Barbadians actually have the institution which, under Prime Minister Sandiford, they referred to as the Social Compact. It comprised the Government , the Private Sector and the Trade Union Movement. The significant exclusion there is the Opposition. If the Social Compact included the Opposition, internal cohesion would benefit since the Compact discussed wages policy, fiscal policy and monetary policy, including exchange rate policy.
The Social Compact could deal with contentious issues like home ownership by Barbadians where foreigners are dispossessing Barbadians of homes by their enormous wealth. Brother Commissiong had raised this issue as an important political one but did not follow through with institutional arrangements to develop a sound basis for national policy . Charity begins at home. There is need for hard thinking on the necessary institutional arrangements to overcome the legacy of colonialism.
Guyana did begin a sort of social compact but excluded both the Opposition and the Trade Union Movement. Jagdeo could not entertain the thought of having Lincoln Lewis sitting at the same table with him discussing wages policy, fiscal policy and exchange rate policy with him. It is an indication of the polarisation in the Guyana social relations. Ms. Gay McDougall , the U.N. Independent expert on Minority Issues observed that two separate and conflicting narratives and perceptions of reality have emerged among Afro- and Indo-Guyanese.
It is only when national policy becomes cohesive that we can entertain the thought of regional policy. In respect of regional policy, we are putting the cart (regional policy ) before the horse( national policy). IT WILL NOT WORK. Economist Dennis Pantin makes the point that regionalism has not been sold to the people. For that reason, regionalism has failed. But the shakers and movers in the integration movement are DEAF.
3. The Independence of the Civil Service
Our democracies become farcical if civil servants cannot give independent opinions that will not necessarily satisfy their political bosses. I remember telling George Reid of Barbados two stories which he told me could not happen in the Caribbean.
The first story is about Barbara Castle who was given the portfolio of Minister of Transport under Harold Wilson in Great Britain. The Minister was unhappy with her Permanent Secretary and requested the Chief Secretary to remove him. The Chief Secretary told Mrs. Castle that when an officer was appointed as permanent secretary, they had every confidence in his or her ability to perform. She would therefore have to work with him. Eighteen months afterwards, when the opportunity arose, the Permanent Secretary was moved.
The second story is one which Sir Shridath Ramphal may recall. In 1974, the British were happy with the way Guyana continued to supply Britain with sugar, albeit at the higher price. They sent their Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Peart, to negotiate with Mr. Burnham a new sugar price regime. Mr. Burnham negotiated with the Minister on a one-on one basis until he reached what he thought was a favourable arrangement for Guyana.
Mr. Burnham called in Sir Shridath who was the leader of the Guyanese officials to indicate the outlines of the agreement. When Sir Shridath reported to both British and Guyanese officials what Mr. Burnham told him, the British Permanent Secretary said immediately that that agreement could not stand. As Mr. Burnham and Mr. Peart emerged, the Permanent Secretary told Mr. Burnham that he could not take that agreement back to Britain and that the arrangement will have to be re-negotiated. Thereupon, the Permanent Secretary took the lead role in negotiating with Mr. Burnham until a satisfactory outcome was reached.
George Reid told me that neither story was possible in the West Indies. The Chief Secretary, with Mrs. Castle , and the Permanent Secretary , with Mr. Peart , will both have been sent home.
That British culture was never developed in the Caribbean. Mr. Burnham undermined any such independence by insisting that he saw the names of the members of the Public Service Commissions before their appointment , and that the Commissions indicated to him the names of the senior civil servants that they were appointing to posts.
The independence of the civil service was dead.. Mr. Barrow in Barbados followed suit. I was in Barbados in 1994 when elections were announced. Senior civil servants were nervous about the election outcome because it meant a possible change of their fortunes.
It is this loss of independence in the civil service that has developed a culture that has made mistreatment of immigrants an acceptable norm. Reference is not made to rules of civil service operations. Civil servants ascribe more importance to the thinking of their bosses than to rules of Customs and Immigration procedures. A more independent civil service will not prevent extradition policy but it will most likely put a brake on its inhumanity.
The situation in Guyana is even worse. An independent Commissioner of Police was hounded out of office to be replaced by a more compliant successor. The Chief Secretary in Britain and Mr. Peart's Permanent Secretary are not envisioned as models. In fact , Tony Blair , in his arbitrariness in the pursuit of the Iraq war went around the principles of proper civil service conduct and has left a thorough mess behind.
The issue of good governance should be raised in this immigration mess. Prime Minister Thompson wielded too much power in assuming office. As Bakunin said, "Take the most radical revolutionary and place him on the throne of all Russia and give him the dictatorial power , and , before a year has passed , he will become worse than the Czar himself."
We are dealing with Bakunin Czars. The system is usually bent to satisfy their wills.
4. The lack of professionalism among Caribbean officials
Caribbean officials , myself included, have been hopelessly unprofessional in our comments on this issue. Because I am intimately involved with the criminality and the cruelty of the Guyana Government, my eyes were closed to the national/regional dilemma that the Barbadians faced and to the underlying deficiency in governance with which the Barbadians have responded to the dilemma . The eyes of the officials, horrified by the inhumanity of the Barbadians , were afraid to lambaste the Guyana Government for the part that it is playing in the suffering of its own people. Since most of us do not come under the jurisdiction of any government, our partiality can be explained only by our desire to be politically correct.
All my arguments about the suffering of Guyanese in Guyana were ignored. A WPA statement on the typical injustice by the courts was not commented on. Complex issues do not have simple solutions. The officials insisted on simple solutions. My solutions were, by no means, simple. But they were undoubtedly one sided.
The purpose of this note is to encourage the CARICOM Heads to avoid simplisms in their addressing the Barbados immigration practices. The main villain of the peace is President Jagdeo but Prime Minister Thompson has transgressed in disobeying the principles of good governance . Reversing those transgressions will take courage to reconcile national with regional sentiment and to change the culture of the civil service. Until those recommended institutional steps are taken, we are spinning top in mud.
5.The failure of Integration
It is patently dishonest to conclude that the CSME is well served with instruments for its success and to expect success in relation to freedom of movement to come from the functioning of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramus. That is one of the arguments for not reversing migrations that have already taken place. There are at least four reasons why integration failed.
The first and most fundamental is that intra-regional trade has diminished rather than increased. If we leave Trinidad's oil out of the development, there is not much difference now between the extent to which CARICOM countries buy from, and sell to, one another and what it was say, two decades ago. There is perhaps some increase in Trinidad manufactures sold in CARICOM but that has come largely at the expense of CARICOM markets lost by CARICOM manufacturers.
The approach of production platforms that held so much promise at the time of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas was killed by the WTO. The value added potential resulting from the manufacture of CARICOM raw materials in CARICOM--raw bauxite using the energy from Trinidad, jewellry manufacture using the gold and diamonds from Guyana and Suriname, the furniture manufacture of wood from the forests from Guyana and Suriname, the processing of fruits throughout CARICOM by CARICOM manufacturers -- was never developed .That would have raised intra-regional trade and provided scope for the movement of CARICOM workers . It has never happened.
The second reason for the failure of the Integration Movement has been the inability to maintain the regional tertiary education system that CARICOM inherited. UWI is regional only in name. In that respect, UWI ,as a regional institution, is almost a farce. Cheddi Jagan first refused the offer by Sir Arthur Lewis to join. Then came the separate country financial arrangements that Willie Demas recommended. That led to the establishment of virtual national campuses under a UWI rubric. When The Bahamas virtually begged to head the hospitality faculty of UWI , she was ignored. Jamaica established an Information Technology Faculty outside of the UWI system. Trinidad did the same with its faculty on Mining. Guyana established a Medical School and , in general, continued its separation from UWI. Since then , expansion of national universities has become the norm.
The Engineering faculty in Trinidad had been unhelpful in developing the electrical engineering industry in St. Kitts. The Agriculture faculty in Trinidad is not dedicated to the sector in CARICOM . It concentrates on the teaching of agricultural science.
The third reason for the failure of the Integration Movement is the inability to develop a regional monetary and financial policy. As CLICO failed, different country responses emerged.
The fourth reason for the failure of Integration is the removal of the focus from the Rex Nettleford development of education for a post slave society. That focus would have meant consideration of the relation between a post slave and a post indenture society. In the sloppiness with which this important cultural dimension is faced, Guyana continues its pursuit of a Little India policy in Guyana and CARICOM abandons Haiti to repression by the Dominican Republic . That is the very Dominica Republic that is seeking to join CARICOM under instructions from the European Union. And CARICOM seems eager to entertain its new member. Are we serious when we speak of our being one people? We are not one people in each country. Can we be one people in the Integration Movement?
The purpose of this letter is to encourage the CARICOM Heads to address the fundamental problems that I have addressed here coprehensively. We must overcome the prejudice that complex problems can be addressed with simple solutions.
Posted
June 19th. 2009
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, in his defence of the PPP in his disagreement with Dr. David Hinds, in relation to the need for a PPP apology, seems ignorant of the permanent destruction of racial harmony in Guyana by Dr. Jagan's refusal to take advantage of the good will that he enjoyed from Africans. At the 1955 Split of the PPP, I, among many other Africans, wrote Mrs. Jagan, expressing our support for Dr. Jagan. I received a response from Mrs. Jagan asking my permission to publish my letter in Thunder. I hesitated because of my reluctance to be drawn into the national arena, but nonetheless agreed to have the letter published. She responded to me to say that she had a much better article from Eusi Kwayana which she preferred to use.
Race relations deteriorated after the Split when the Jagans decided to rely on race to hold on to political power. In 1956 December, when the PPP decided to hold its congress in Berbice, Dr. Jagan, who was restricted to Georgetown, sent his recorded speech to Kwayana for comments. Jagan ranted and raved at the left wing of the Party in that recording. He accused the left of leading from too far in front, a concept that he had borrowed from Mao Tse Tung. Kwayana's response, which he published, accused Jagan of his refusal to put down racism when it raised its ugly head in the PPP.
At the 1957 elections, Dr. Jagan, by then free to move to Buxton went to request Eusi Kwayana to join his ticket. Kwayana indicated that he was standing as an independent in the East Coast constituency. Jagan promised to use every fibre in his being to defeat Kwayana. On the day of nomination, Mr. Burnham withdrew his candidate from contesting the seat. Jagan, true to his promise, nominated Balram Singh Rai to contest the seat. At a campaign meeting at the corner of Vlissingen Road and Sheriff St., I asked some members of the crowd for whom they would vote. They said that they could never forget Kwayana who had championed their cause on several occasions on the sugar estates and were voting for Kwayana.
When the Jagans realised that Kwayana was likely to have East Indian support, they resurrected the apan jhat concept to defeat Kwayana. On the night of the elections, Albert Ogle, at the Kitty polling station, turned to Balram Singh Rai, a friend, and observed that Rai was losing. Rai responded with the comment, "Race nah done." "Race," used in that context, had a double meaning. The visceral response was alarming because Ogle, Rai and Kwayana were young teachers on the East Coast with an exceptionally close friendship which Jagan destroyed when he peeled off Rai to pursue his goal of defeating Kwayana. It turned out that Kwayana lost out in the East Coast precincts where the apan jhat concept had sunken in.
Jan Carew told me in London that he was interpreting for Jagan in a discussion that Jagan was having with a Mexican communist. The Mexican asked Jagan what strategy he would use to defeat Burnham if Burnham attempted to use the Norman Manley approach to win over the left as in Jamaica. Jagan said, without hesitation, that he had no such fear because the birth rate was in his favour. Carew told Jagan that the response was not doctrinaire, and that he could not tell that to the Mexican. Jagan told Carew to tell the Mexican whatever he wished, but that that was the fact as he saw it.
While he was premier in 1958, Jagan decided famously to withdraw from the West Indian Federation because he wished, he said, to avoid the bourgeois association that dominated the West Indian leadership. The real reason was his refusal to sink his East Indian majority into an African majority in the Federation. When Sir Arthur Lewis beseeched him to join the University of the West Indies, he refused for much the same reason that prompted his withdrawal from the Federation.
Matters escalated in the 1957 Government when Jagan decided to put emphasis on the cultivation of rice (for export to Cuba) at the expense of the African economy that was based on fruits and ground provisions. This difference escalated into "political" murder, the first of which was committed in 1961 as reported by Kwayana in Next Witness. Thereafter, the training of Party members in Cuba to kill PNC members, deepened the racial conflict.
Kwayana said the following in Next Witness: "Many good men feel that, in supporting Jagan, they are supporting all that is decent in Guiana. They have never been told that this man Jagan is himself the spearhead of Indian racialism, which, as it became more and more aggressive under Jagan, caused the Africans to organise themselves, so far as their urbanisation permitted them, on racial lines in a last minute effort at self defence."
Earlier in Next Witness, Kwayana stated that: "First, the Government (i.e. the Jagan Government of 1957 to 1964), the guilty party in the matter of racial conflict, wished to hide the truth because it wants immediate Independence under a constitution which will leave it free to strangle the breath of the African people and the minorities, to create here an East Indian state, to plant the East Indies in the West Indies."
This racial bias deepened to the point where any trace of African blood in a PPP leader disqualifies him or her from PPP Party leadership. In this polarisation of the society, the PPP does have everything to apologise for. The Party has clearly lost the opportunity to lead in the development of a post slave society that incorporates post indentureship as the pillars of the post colonial historical tradition. No one had a greater opportunity to lead in this respect than Dr. Jagan. Kwayana campaigned for him in the East Coast constituency in 1948. Kwayana championed Jagan's leadership of the PPP when he was challenged by Burnham after the 1953 elections. Yet Jagan hounded Kwayana in the 1957 elections. He rejected the enlightened approach of developing a post slave / post indentureship society when he refused to join the West Indian Federation and the University of the West Indies and when he got rid of the left wing of the PPP, including Martin Carter, after 1957. Jagan has left a Party that is so biased to the East Indies state concept, that its most enlightened present day leader is debarred from Party leadership because of an ancestor that is African. Those are immense crimes. The permanent polarisation of the country is a crime for which the PPP should always apologise. The PNC's apology is necessary for its incorrect diagnosis of the cultural debacle caused by the PPP in its unrelenting pursuit of the East Indies state. As Kwayana said in Next Witness, "the PNC does not want to admit the racial conflict in the open because it is hoping to win over East Indian voters, which of course, it will never do."
Mr. Ramkarran faces a dilemma similar to the one faced by the PNC. He should join those who see permanent polarisation because of the pursuit of an East Indies state as destructive and should himself demand an apology for the untenability of the East Indies state concept that Jagan has bequeathed to his successors.
Posted
October 25th. 2008
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
Empowering local authorities to make decisions about developing people and production in their respective jurisdictions is, as the word "empowering" suggests, an important aspect of power sharing. The central government in a multi-racial society must not only share power horizontally at the executive level to ensure multi-race rule. It must share power vertically to guarantee that multi-race rule is reflected at all levels of government.
Local government ,seen in these terms, democratises governance by providing opportunities for people at the lower tiers to participate in the decisions that govern their lives. That participation is at its fullest when there is iteration, that is a transparent process of going back and forth, between central and local government in respect of resource allocation, thus making it difficult to arrive at once-and-for-all objective criteria for fiscal transfers as considered desirable by Mr. Corbin in his press statement of October 10th., 2008. Such criteria would perpetuate inequalities. This will be disadvantageous to the PNCR constituencies.
Fiscal transfers should aim to reduce inequities and should vary according to differences in the objective circumstances of the local communities. Wealth inequities are huge. Arnold and Sobrina Boodram recently found bail money of U.S.$10.0 million (about two billion Guyana dollars) for a New York court. The Boodrams alone can buy out a whole African village on the Essequibo Coast and still have change left over. The narcotics trade has made the wealth inequality situation extremely complex, thereby making pre-conceived objective criteria for fiscal transfers practically useless.
Fiscal transfers require the iteration between the communities and the Central Government as envisaged above. Is this likely in the 2009 Budget? The answer is, "No". Guyanese political parties remain "terribly limited" (borrowing here from Chinweizu in his analysis of Nigerian independence). Despite the shouting of Marxism/Leninism, political parties are devoid of an analysis or a theory of our anti-colonial struggle. The dilemma now being faced at Skeldon and the recent tortuous negotiations with the European Union for an Economic Partnership Agreement bear witness to our emptiness in relation to the Chinweizu's imperatives.The Budget will remain stuck in a colonial top-down paradigm. Backwardness is the hall mark of our governance and our budgeting.
The wealth inequalities in the society will not be overcome in a short time. They will never be overcome, however, if races do not seek internal alliances within their own racial groups before seeking alliances across racial groups. Middle class Africans and the leaders in the PNCR and the AFC do not understand that East Indian businesses, fishing co-operatives, and farming associations will not admit African businesses on the same terms of their existing net work relations. When the PNCR claims that it cannot strive for African people because they wish to avoid a racial label, the party is being extremely naïve.
The grass roots organisations, that is, the local authorities, provide the potential for racial uniting which will be lost in the present larger groupings where the more moneyed classes and better organised racial networks kill African collective self-determination efforts since it is not in their interest to support such African assertiveness. This is what has happened in the existing Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs).
When the demand for executive power sharing at the top is made without the demand for racial empowerment at the bottom, Bharrat Jagdeo sees through the effort as elite power grabbing and calls it grabbing power by the back door. It should more properly be called grabbing power for individual self-serving purposes since the sharing of power at the executive level will be empty if it is not consistent with self-determination and participation by Africans at all levels of the society.
Self serving is very obvious in the follow up to Vincent Alexander's disclosure that the village councils will be restored with 50/50 representation between first past the post and proportional representation and that the same split will apply to Georgetown and the other towns. The 50/50 representation split is dysfunctional anyhow. But even if it were not, there has been no effort in Georgetown to operationalise first past the post elections by defining ward boundaries.
Similarly, the restoration of village councils will necessitate redrawing East Indian community boundaries that are now part of the NDCs. The Task Force glosses over this problem by denying the restored village councils tax collecting authority. With the 50/50 representation arrangements, the councilors selected directly by the villagers will be figureheads.
There is a lack of completeness in thinking through these recommendations that supports Chinweizu's argument that we are held captive within the economic and cultural structures of the British Empire which the British politely and craftily renamed "The Commonwealth". The fact that we seem unable to think for ourselves is dangerous at this time that the world's economic systems are facing collapse.
It is this inability to make consistent changes in our governance structures that hamstrings our development . The AFC has intervened in the bulldozing of houses in Timehri and has launched a petition for the relief of the citizens whose houses have been destroyed by the Government. When Mr. Francis Farrier approached Minister Robeson Benn on the wanton destruction at Timehri, the Minister indicated that the way was being made for a developer.
Timehri falls within Region Four. There is both a local authority and a Regional Authority that should have been apprised of this development. Apparently, the regional and local authorities have not been involved in the negotiation with the developer.The AFC is struck by the inhumanity and the arbitrariness of the highhanded action of the Government.
But there is a bigger issue to be considered here that the AFC missed. And that is the respective jurisdictions of the Government and the regional authority and the local authority. Power sharing is not only an executive level issue. It is a matter of sharing power with local authorities. A national consensus among the races cannot be arrived at the top if it is not accompanied by arrangements that empower all races at the bottom to achieve racial parity in their communities.
This thorough grasp is what is so disappointing in the PNCR's and the AFC's grasp of local government reform.
Posted
May 3rd. 2008
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
With respect to an article in circulation in cyberspace on "The show must go on," I would like to say that I wholeheartedly support Mr. Corbin's position that Carifesta X should be boycotted if concessions are not made to improve governance in Guyana. I would not myself use terms such as "unmanageable" and I would not limit the area of concern to the restoration of the licence of TV Station Channel 6. I would list five objectives of a boycott of Carifesta. They are: (1) The return of the Licence to TV Station Channel 6. (2) An end to uni-race rule. (3) The thorough going application of the Separation of Powers in governance. (4) Empowerment of the local authorities to govern their own lives. (5) The decentralisation of the administration to cope with managing the vast territorial space of the country.
This agenda is huge and questions can be asked about the wisdom of imposing such a huge agenda on a relatively small matter as Carifesta. In economics, we have a rule that we should have as many instruments as targets. In the state of desperation that we have in Guyana, we have to abandon that rule and hinge everything, for the time being, on a single instrument, namely the boycotting of Carifesta. The boycott provides a small window of opportunity to peaceful change in governance which, if not taken, can lead to unfortunate consequences. It is a way out of the low grade war which is being waged in Guyana and which is resulting in severe legal and administrative transgressions.
This Government thrives on dishonesty and Goebbels type propaganda to subdue all its citizens, East Indian as well as African. The people who are expected to participate in Carifesta are characterised as not pulling their weight and as lazy. References are made to psycopaths who must be hunted down and killed. We have been discussing the issue of marginalisation with Dr. Prem Misir who, is calm and reasonable in our exchanges, but who, in Jekyll and Hyde fashion, simultaneously blasts the Opposition for tearing the country apart. The two personalities of Dr. Misir are totally incompatible. It is a feature that is characteristic of the Government.
It is necessary to aim a psychological blow at the President who wishes to show an international face of enlightenment while behaving, as described by a colleague, as a control freak. If the people, primarily the African people, say that they will boycott Carifesta, the likely embarrassment should force reasonable concessions to improve governance that President Jagdeo will never concede unless he is forced to do so. He needs the shock that he will not always escape accountability by hypocrisy.
Dr. Misir in his rant against the oppositional elements praises the Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture (JIA) for giving priority to Caribbean agriculture when President Jagdeo, at home, has stifled agriculture by the sheer incompetence in managing drainage and irrigation. Instead of giving priority to dredging the Georgetown Harbour and freeing up the canals for more efficient drainage of the City, the President gave priority to World Cup Cricket. Seven of the main rivers of the country have not been dredged for several years, with the consequence that their higher water levels have made drainage more difficult. These facts do not feature in Dr. Misir's euphoric praise of the President. It is all so patently dishonest.
Mr. Sharma's behaviour in permitting several re-broadcasts of the threat to the President's life cannot be condoned. He needs to be penalisd though the withdrawal of the licence for 4 months is excessive. Mr. Sharma was providing a window into the suffering of the poor and the broadcast indiscretion provided an excuse to shut him down so that the horrors in Guyana can be hidden for a while.
Guyana is in crisis, in part because of the inappropriate structure and functioning of governance, but also because narcotics and fuel smuggling are corrupting Guyana on a large scale. The Opposition is not free from blame. It has to clean up its act. But it can contribute to an improvement in the lives of Guyanese if it sticks to its guns and encourages a boycott of Carifesta. Terms like making the occasion unmanageable are threatening and should be avoided. The Opposition should use the occasion to get the people to speak to the Government peacefully to end the low grade war that is at present prevailing. Boycotting Carifesta is a way to start. References to Mr. Burnham's initiating Carifesta, although true, are completely irrelevant. Mr. Burnham is dead and long gone.
There are no likely winners from the current confrontation in the country. The answer is to ameliorate the conditions by which the country is governed by addressing the five objectives listed above. The answer is not to be found in making use of the credibility of outstanding Guyanese to smooth over the immense fissures in the society. There is no congruence between those fissures and the entertainment that will be provided by Carifesta.
Posted
February 6th. 2008
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
It is disappointing that none of the political parties has responded positively to the editorial on "Massacre of the 11," published in SN, January 29th. The proposal set out in the editorial was one that has been adopted by Guatemala to battle narco-induced crime and corruption.
As reported in the SN editorial, "Guatemala and the United Nations announced the establishment of an international team of investigators to aid the criminal justice system in its fight against organised crime. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala will comprise 150 lawyers and forensic grandees who will prosecute cases in local courts, relying heavily on scientific evidence-something completely lacking in local jurisprudence."
The comprehensiveness of the UN approach is appealing especially for Guyanese who are still largely colonial in outlook and who disparage our oft repeated calls for decentralisation and depoliticisation of our public administration. A large number of politicians and officials will most likely leave Guyana as evidence pointing to their involvement in narco crime becomes public.
The AFC should get the facts relating to this initiative and request the PNCR and the GAP / ROAR alliance to call for an emergency session of Parliament to debate the proposal for its urgent adoption in Guyana. Many Guyanese in the diaspora would welcome the opportunity to return to Guyana to work for salaries that should be pitched at levels within the reach of those paid to CARICOM officials working in Guyana. The expertise of these officials will facilitate the establishment of electronic data bases at Lethem (where we are not ready for the bridge across the Takatu), at Mahdia, at Bartica, at Anna Regina, at Charity, at Morawhana, at Port Kaituma, at New Amsterdam, at Orealla, at Linden and at Ituni. These data bases should relate to the businesses and farms operating in the respective areas, providing details of their output, their employment and their profits. Barama has built an all weather road that stretches from Supenaam to the Venezuelan border. The Malaysians know more about the resources along that road than Messrs Sam Hinds and Robeson Benn.
We are thankful to Stabroek News for information on the UN facility and urge the AFC to take the "change" in their name seriously, publish the details of the scheme in their newspaper, travel around the country and canvass for this change in the approach to managing the security crisis in Guyana.
Time is of the essence in getting this facility. The present leaders of both the PPP and the PNCR are too compromised to seek this UN assistance. What will proceed from here on is the murder of alleged criminals to placate supporters as if the lives extinguished in this cruel game of racial control are worth no more than the mosquitoes that are swatted away from one's hands as nuisances.
I am convinced that the political solutions to reducing crime will never be taken by our leaders who are full of talk but refuse to act. When looking at the Sharma TV tape of the Lusignan community protesting against "the massacre of the eleven" (the protesters said "twelve"), one is struck by the viability of that community to function as a decision making unit for its advance into modernity. Such an advance is impossible, however, if economic activities remain stuck in the unchanged and undeveloped plantation production and social relations and in the top-down edicts of two worn-out political Juggernauts, fighting the battles of the 1950s and the 1960s.
Lusignan is not the only community where there is an energy yearning for taking its place in the modern world. So is Buxton / Friendship; so is Enterprise, so is Victoria; so are tens of other communities and villages on the coast and in the hinterland. But these places are imprisoned by small minded politicians who distribute guns to selected cohorts and who sit in neighbourhood democratic councils making decisions in a zero-sum environment that is producing the same sugar, the same rice, the same cassava, the same plantains that we were producing for the last 300 years. There has been miniscule processing and little effort to get into the top end of delectability and of nutritional sophistication. We are technology users, not technology innovators. We are stuck in the mud, hence some justification for being called mud-heads.
The UN facility will make it possible to take guns away from civilians, whether those civilians are Africans or East Indians. This will be a first step to the restoration of law and order. The responsibility for the protection of the society rests with the police. The ridiculousness of the attack on Eve Leary and the scampering for safety by frightened police men is amusing if it were not an indication of the extent to which the state has failed. A state has failed when it cannot maintain its physical, social and economic infrastructure and when its institutional structures have no capability for recapitulation, correction and continuous resuscitation. In those terms Guyana is a failed state. The UN facility provides us an opportunity for the institutional framework to be revived. The AFC should join with Stabroek News and campaign for its immediate adoption in Guyana. Time is not on our side.
Posted
December 13th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Kaieteur News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
The hold up in my response to Mr. Skinner's letter on "African Guyanese are not engaging their energies on the right issues" (S.N., Dec. 2nd) was the result of my desire to include in my response the central argument of my letter captioned, "Breaking into the East Indian bloc is difficult because of their greater cultural cohesion," (S.N. Nov. 27th.) That central argument was omitted from the letter as published because of an incorrect attribution of the premiss on which my thinking was based. Stabroek News correctly removed the incorrect attribution.
I now restate that central argument more emphatically than I did before. In its present formulation, the argument is as follows: Africans have a sacred right to resist being ruled by another race. A right is an exceedingly strong claim. It cannot be over-ridden by a majority or even by a super majority. Such a right is inalienable. It cannot be taken away.
Extending the inalienable right from the African individual to the African race, requires recall of the brutal imprisonment, terror and premature death to which Africans, as a group, were subjected. From the depths of the horrors of the bottom deck of the slave ships, the separation from kith and kin, the loss of language, the whip lashes of cat-o'-nine-tails with nails in the 'lashes' to cut the skin, African society has emerged from the African holocaust, the most brutal suffering imposed on mankind, and is struggling to create an African future.
Africans have a right to create that future. They will have necessarily to share that future with East Indians, Amerindians and Mixed races but it must be a future in which the distinctiveness of Africans and African culture must stand out.
In my Nov. 27th letter, I had drawn much the same conclusion of a right from the negative imperative uttered in 1997 / 1998 that East Indians must never be ruled by Black people again. Continuing from that negativity, I agreed with Mr. Ogunseye that, by the same token, East Indians should not rule Black people. In effect, no one race should rule the other. What will work is shared governance.
That was the approach implicit in Brother Kwayana's call in 1961 for joint premiership. It is an approach that does not require Westminister electoral subterfuges to dethrone the PPP. There is no need to appoint an East Indian head of the PNC to draw East Indian support from the PPP.
What will work is an agreement at the national level that an African purpose driven society (fulfilling the dreams formulated at the bottom of the slave ship) will co-exist with an East Indian purpose driven society, with an Amerindian purpose driven society and a Mixed people's purpose driven society.
There will be many instances where the various purpose driven societies will merge and a true national society will emerge. But the mergers will not be forced. They will come from the security that racial distinctiveness exists and is encouraged unlike the present situation where the dominant culture pursues dishonest subterfuges to suppress Africans who are deemed racist (the code word is Afro-centric) when they return to the dream before and during and after the brutality in the belly of the slave ship.
This approach to dealing with the racial problem faces up to the fact that the country is comprised of different races and that harmony in co-existence cannot be achieved if a fundamental aspect of existence, namely race, is ignored. The plantation, in which we still largely reside is premised on a perpetuation of destructive rivalry between the races. Moreover, the plantation is inflexible. It is the only form of a modern corporation that does not envisage product diversity nor hierarchical mobility. A cane cutter starts to cut cane at sixteen and ends his working life in that unchanging servitude. In today's world, he is exposed to television which portrays alternative life styles. In frustration, he falls prey to alcoholism, wife beating, sexual adventurism, AIDS and suicide. These afflictions find their way into the entire society and contribute to an evil pandemic in the life of the body politic of Guyana. The society has not escaped from the anger of the Africans who were brutalised at the bottom of the slave ship. "Forget the past," we are told. That is easier said than done. The past lives on in our bones.
We will forget the past when we dismantle the plantation and recognise that we should build the political and social economy from collaborative and co-operative entities which should comprise the foundations of the society. The field operations of the sugar estates should be transformed into agricultural co-operatives of sugar farmers, co-ordinated by farmer agencies, working to deliver the canes to factories which are also co-operatively owned. This will liberate the sugar plantation and bring collaboration instead of destructive competition to the production mode. It will take a decade, or perhaps more, but it can be done.
Similar approaches are necessary in the rice peasantry and in the African villages. The rice peasants need larger plots to earn a livelihood that will encourage domicility. They should also, as with the sugar co-operatives, be allowed shares in the rice mills which should also be transformed into co-operatives from their present mini plantation social and production relations.
The African villages can revert to their preference for orchards and mixed agricultural activities. They can modernise their holdings for the same purpose of long term viability and develop processing and food preservation facilities for overseas markets. These village co-operatives can reach higher in the processing world to manufacture high quality health foods that can hold their own with the best from Brazil, the U.S.A., Japan and Europe. The present pattern of entrepreneurial investments in processing without collaborating with suppliers is not sustainable.
The sky is the limit in the collaborative approach and it can all be based on the efforts of village and community councils that will be the building blocks of the social and political economy. The problem we must face is the role of the state.
Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, described how the U.S. government intervened in the economy. "The conventional wisdom that the United States development was the result of unfettered capitalism is wrong," he said.
"Historically, the U.S. Government played an [even] larger role in the economy in promoting development, including the development of technology and infrastructure. In the nineteenth century, when agriculture was at the centre of the economy, government created the whole system of agricultural universities and "extension" services. Huge land grants spurred the development of western railroads. In the nineteenth century the U.S. government funded the first telegraph line; in the twentieth, it funded the research that led to the Internet.
"The United States was successful partly because of the role that its government played in promoting development, in regulating markets and in providing basic social services."
This model of government intervention requires capable leaders, bright and honest public servants and institutions that work. Those criticising Africans for lacking development ideas should point their finger elsewhere.
Mr. Skinner is proud to be a product of the plantation. That is the institution that was the recipient of the most horribly brutalised human beings, that stood still in relation to developing diversity in production and that transferred profits to England for the finance of British capitalism. It has left behind a society that cannot take care of its sick people and is now building a mafia culture of hitmen while side stepping the rule of the law.
We are proud of our development ideas. But our ideas perish in the hands of those members of the plantation that thrive on exploitation of their fellow human beings and that bang them on their heads with guns to either murder them or terrify them with shots in the air. Africans are at present being ruled by bullies. They have a right to resist such rule.
The electoral shenanigans of Westminister are not necessary. As Dr. David Hinds points out, Westminister flourishes in a culture where government ministers, shadow politicians and senior civil servants all go to the same schools where they learn the same codes of behaviour. The disparate origins of our leaders know only one code-Get rich quick.
Mr. Skinner has a good heart and is obviously well liked by the political class. He should strive to enlighten our leaders to intervene for development as Professor Stiglitz outlines the American government did and continues to do.
Posted
December 5th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
Mr. Skinner, in his letter captioned "African intellectuals must be imaginative and consider new strategies other than aggression" (SN, Nov. 22nd), places the burden for the reduction of ethnic politics on Africans. The accusation that African intellectuals have not placed emphasis on production strategies is false. Mr. Burnham certainly placed emphasis on a production strategy that was anti-colonial. It failed for the reason that it was not based on participation by the East Indian grass roots in its formulation and because it bit off more than it could chew in its challenge to imperialism. Mr. Hoyte, after Mr. Burnham, reverted to a neo-liberal market strategy in his Economic Recovery Programme that East Indians welcomed and benefitted from.
It is the PPP that has been unimaginative about new strategies. Dr. Jagan in 1957 intensified rice production to the exclusion of developing other agricultural activities. The current PPP management continues the 1957 rice production emphasis while deepening sugar plantation production at Skeldon. A great show was made in the early 1990s of enhancing agricultural technology at the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) which amounted to no more than re-inventing the wheel and cleansing NARI of Africans. Some aqua culture has been added to the colonial activities while ground provisions and vegetables have been expanded in East Indian communities for the domestic market and for export, primarily to Europe.
Messrs Stanley Ming, Eric Phillips and Kadz Khan proposed the Guyana 21 strategy in 1994 which Dr. Jagan immediately squelched. Mr. P.Q. DeFreitas, supported by investors from Germany and the United States, formulated programmes in the late 1990s for expanding bauxite industry products. The PPP immediately killed those proposals. Mr. Hoyte and Mr. Greenidge left office with an energy plan that the IDB was prepared to finance to the extent of U.S. $ 80 million. The PPP leadership rejected the offer on the ideological grounds that it included a private sector generating operation.
Recently the IDB made finance available for a road to Timehri that will parallel the East Bank road. So far, President Jagdeo has not drawn on the funds. The parallel road was first conceived by Mr. Burnham and was part of the Guyana 21 programme of projects. The rejection of a Burnham idea is a standard reflex response of the PPP.
In the meantime, the Government has struggled along with what is, in effect, an ethnic development strategy. The cricket stadium, the resurfacing and the lighting of the country roads, the airport improvement, the traffic lights, the Skeldon project, the Berbice River bridge, the accomodation of narcotic drug financed projects, the coseting of money launderers, the under taxation of the East Indian business class--these efforts bias development away from western finance to a mixture of Indian and drug finance.
The effect of this PPP development approach is to keep the country in the plantocracy type rivalry between East Indians and Africans with the consequent concepts of either East Indian rule or African rule. Mr. Ogunseye must be understood in that context. He agrees with Mrs. Jagan that East Indians should never be ruled by Black people. But by the same token, he argues, Africans should not be ruled by East Indians. In effect, no one race should rule the other. Africans have a sacred right to resist East Indian rule. What will work is shared governance.
When seen in these terms, even shared governance amounts to the most enlightened solution to the racial rivalry bequeathed to us by a plantocracy that used racial rivalry to prop up an ailing sugar industry. Consociational models are only relevant if perceived in terms of the plantation on which we still largely live.
Mr. Skinner is a victim of the plantation. He is confused, thinking at one level that all East Indians have the same interest as the leaders of the bloc, and, at another level, that the PNC and the AFC can break into the bloc. In respect of the second level, he does not specify how to break into the bloc.
Breaking into the East Indian bloc is more difficult than breaking into the African bloc because of the greater cultural cohesion of the East Indian group. A division in the East Indian ranks will come about when East Indian workers and East Indian peasants are led to challenge the hegemony of the East Indian elite. If that challenge is seen as coming primarily from Africans, the cultural cohesiveness of the East Indians will lead to their closing ranks very quickly. They closed ranks against Mr. Ravi Dev, Mr. Sharma and Mr. Ramjattan and will do so more quickly if the challenge comes from Mr. Corbin.
East Indian trade union leaders may have the best chance. They should see the commonality of workers' interests and resist the emerging class society led by the PPP, the East Indian business class, the Colombians and the Brazilians. This elite will be ruled by criminal elements that have already established control over a lot of what goes on in Guyana.
Does Mr. Skinner think that African intellectuals can break control by the criminal elite by thinking out of the box? It is Mr. Komal Chand and his colleagues in GAWU who must ask themselves whether they are satisfied with the fate of cane cutters who are consigned to eternal servitude. Somewhat less than half of the cane that will supply the Skeldon factory will come from cane cutters. Why? Cane cutters are migrating to Suriname. They are likely to remain in Guyana if they are cane farmers. GAWU should recognise that the FITUG fracturing of the trade union movement amounts to the strengthening of a PPP dictatorship that will be supported by Colombians and Brazilians and that will exert tyrannical control over the lower classes of all races.
This new dictatorship will be formidable because of a language and a skill advantage and because Guyanese administrators are weak. Considerable turmoil will follow unless a miracle occurs and the criminal elements in control see wisdom in re-establishing law and order and in reaching out to the lower classes with education and training programmes. In the meantime, Africans should consolidate their ranks to resist oppression. They have formulated development strategies in the past which have been, for the most part, rejected.
Finally, I leave the readers to judge whether I am, or Mr. Skinner is, the more naïve. That should spark a useful debate.
Posted
October 7th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
It is difficult to comment, without anger, on the article in Stabroek News of October 7th, on "Local government reform: First draft bill almost complete." The decision makers in the reform process are so obstinate. This is because they are intellectually lazy and irresponsible.
Local government is largely an African phenomenon. East Indians, in the rural areas, who live largely in plantation arrangements under rice estate land lords, sugar estate jurisdictions and miscellaneous unorganised areas, have little or no formal local government history. The PNC decision makers, largely urban dwellers, who know nothing of the intricate human relations in the rural areas, crudely lumped rural peoples with different post slavery experiences into neighbourhood democratic councils. For Africans, the experiment has been a disaster.
The Local Government Task Force never adequately addressed three complexities. The first is the re-drawing of community boundaries to empower people with separate histories to pursue their separate efforts at self determination. The arrangements in the rural areas actually empower the East Indians, without a formal local government history, to make decisions for Africans who do have a local government history. African villages are being killed in the process and the PNC, paragons of political correctness, seem happy with the consequential subjugation.
The second area of omission is that of taxation reform. When Mr. Corbin was in Washington, D.C., U.S.A., about a month ago, I pointed out to him that local communities would need financial help to develop their economies. He agreed but suggested proportionality in respect of such financing. It is clear that Mr. Corbin was aiming at fairness in providing financial help but he misunderstands the problem. The solution is not financing according to a proportionality principle but financing according to need, based on grass roots development proposals. The allocation process must be made transparent. That is how the fairness will be achieved.
In the area of specific taxes, the Task Force has also been weak. In the first place, property taxation is complicated by a wealth tax that has been part of the taxation framework since the first Jagan government during 1957 to 1964. The tax is antediluvian and should have been off the books ever since. The Task Force seems never to have heard of the wealth tax.
The impression is given that local jurisdictions would have the authority to set their own property tax rates. Nothing could be more inefficient. The Government should determine a single set of property tax rates for the whole country-Georgetown, the gated housing estates of the drug lords and the oversized houses in the rural areas.
The property tax should be a liability to the Central Government which could be collected either by the local authority or by the Central Government. If it is collected by the Central Government, it should be turned over to the local authority in full.
The efficient collection of property taxes requires a competent de-centralised administration. Ideally this de-centralised administration should be de-politicised. De-centralisation and de-politicisation were not specified in the terms of reference of the Task Force but it is hard to see how the commissioners could have closed their eyes to improvements that would enhance the efficiency of local governance.
The third and totally inappropriate decision is the 50 / 50 proportional representation / constituency split for the electoral system. How could enlightened professionals recommend the same electoral representation arrangement for all local authorities? Isn't that the height of intellectual laziness? An attempt should be made to draw up wards for Greater Georgetown. A proportional representation bias will most likely result in a PPP majority in the City Council. How stupid can the PNCR commissioners get? Should they not await the results of the house-to-house registration and the determination of ward boundaries before considering a proportional representation / constituency split?
If community and village council boundaries are re-drawn, then there is no need for a proportional representation or a constituency split in the villages and in the rural communities. Those who are recognised as village and community leaders can be elected according to a personal popular vote as used to obtain in the days of the village councils. It is consistent with strengthening community bonds. Why tear a village apart by political party rivalry?
The PPP are in a hurry to draft the bill to continue the suffocation of Africans and to achieve control of Georgetown. The PNCR are in a hurry to oblige. The PNCR should indicate to Mr. Jagdeo that the reform process will take more time and that it is better to lay the foundation for a fair and equitable arrangement that will result in rural governance that will reduce the tensions that give rise to vigilante and other civilian gun holding. Rural peace and reduced crime will be the benefits of better conceived proposals.
Posted
June 21st. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Recent exchanges in the Stabroek News columns indicate that we are ill served by political parties and political leaders who refuse to articulate their philosophies. I had argued with Mr. Dev that it was hypocritical to speak of democracy if the concept did not include economic democracy. Social democracy, which seems to be preferred by most Western welfare type states, should include both political democracy and economic democracy. When economic democracy is given active thought, the democratic agenda becomes really difficult.
Achieving democracy in multi-racial societies is a major task because capitalism favours races that are more market friendly. In Guyana, that means that East Indians both because of history and culture, achieve higher incomes and greater wealth. If we genuinely wish to achieve racial parity, Government intervention will be necessary, therefore, to strengthen programmes for Africans and Amerindians in education and in co-operative businesses. Government intervention will also be necessary to increase financial resources to Africans and Amerindians and to tailor governance arrangements to the history and special circumstances of the various races.
It is obvious that any such government intervention will benefit from participation by the various races in the Cabinet. The statement in the African Renaissance that shared governance is a fundamental "human right" of African Guyanese is therefore appropriate. In fact, as I have argued when responding to Mr. Raymond Gaskin, shared governance is a "fundamental right" of all the races in a multi-racial society. It is the only guarantee that racial parity will be pursued in a multi-racial capitalist society.
In this framework, it is difficult to see the distinction made by Mr. Jerome Khan between Mr. Hoyte's concept of political shared governance and the model of ethnic shared governance advocated by "ethnic opportunists." Is the struggle for racial parity one of ethnic opportunism? (See Mr. Khan's letter captioned "Mr. Phillips helped the PNCR to lose the last elections by urging young people not to register." [SN June 7th])
Mr. Khan may be concerned with how to achieve shared governance that is not "protean and elusive," to use Mr. Hoyte's memorable characterisation of power sharing. For Mr. Khan's benefit, an article written by Mr. Phillips and myself stressed that power sharing will work best in the context of an agreed national development strategy. The existing draft of our national development strategy needs updating to incorporate arrangements for achieving social, political and economic democracy while maintaining the distinctiveness of our separate cultures.
From this perspective, the requests by Minister Rohee and General Secretary Donald Ramotar for ethnic balance in the Guyana Police Force are exceedingly narrow, and disappointingly so, coming as they do, from supposedly enlightened leaders of the majority group. (See Stabroek News Editorial on "Alternative Security." SN June 8th.) Their recommendations for neighbourhood and community policing are at odds with the local government arrangements that will facilitate equity in the development of the rural areas. Their approach of a reliance on coercion by force ignores the opportunities for collaboration between the races that is possible if local government is comprehensively reconceptualised.
The exchanges between Mrs. Sheila Holder and Mr. Aubrey Rettymeyer should be similarly assessed in the context of power sharing to achieve development with racial parity. (See Sheila Holder, in her letter captioned "It was the PNCR who played Abna Babna with the nominations to the Public Service Commission" SN June 8th, and Mr. Rettymeyer in his letter, "The votes for the Alliance were mainly African," SN June 5th).
Mr. Rettymeyer's argument is that racial voting patterns are entrenched and that political parties must represent their constituents. Mrs. Holder's response, like Mr. Jerome Khan's, sees a future in national and not racial programmes, obliterating from their reasoning the cultural attributes that constitute the basis of racial inequalities and that inspire the arguments in this letter.
Mrs. Holder's and Mr. Khan's national stances are naïve. We are not a nation. When Mr. Roger Khan was extradited to the U.S.A., a senior PPP politician complained about the unfairness of the rendition process. When the U.S.A. accused Mr. Abdul Kadir and Mr. Abdul Nur of terrorism, the senior politicians of the PPP applauded. The difference in the responses comes from racial and not national sentiments. Roger Khan is East Indian. Abdul Kadir and Abdul Nur are Africans. Is that knee-jerk racial response from the PPP an indication of our having achieved nationhood?
Mr. Khan and Mrs. Holder must take on board the separate agendas of the racial groups that voted for their respective parties. It is perfectly possible and, for that matter necessary, for the political parties to represent Africans as a group at the same time that they represent East Indians and Amerindians as groups. It is hard work for the PNCR and the AFC but it has to be done. It will assist the parties in their power sharing roles. The PPP represents East Indians automatically by its cultural affinity with the total East Indian social and economic experience.
This brings me to the suggested opportunism of Mr. Eric Phillips. In the presentation of the Renaissance Imperatives with which Mr. Phillips is associated, shared governance as a fundamental "human right" heads the list of imperatives. I have demonstrated the appropriateness of that position. With respect to the other renaissance imperatives, objections could come only from those who do not wish to see African parity with East Indians. These additional imperatives include (1) the stimulation of cultural pride (2) the nurturing of a commitment to self determination through self employment, (3) the commitment to tackle the scourge of AIDS, (4) the revitalisation of African villages, (5) the recapture of the importance of a sound education, (6) the nurturing and creation of youth leaders, (7) the bringing together of African organisations and African leaders, (8) the immersion of the African intelligentsia in the ending of poverty, ignorance and backwardness, and (9) taking control of African destiny.
This is an agenda for reversing the 1200 year cultural assault on Africans by Arabs and the 500 year cultural destruction of Africans by Europeans. There is nothing opportunistic about it. Each political party should include it in its consideration of a programme, just as it would give consideration to an East Indian and an Amerindian agenda.
The reason why this realistic approach appears frightening is that the parties, with the exception of the PPP with its bogus Marxism, but with its reliance on East Indian cultural hegemony, have not thought through the elements of their political philosophy. They need to do so to avoid being naïve and timid in facing the demands for equity in a multi-racial society.
Posted
June 21st. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Guyana should not sign over the actual day-to-day implementation of the house-to-house registration of voters to Dr. Steve Surujabally and to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM). (See the KN, June 17th headline "GECOM ready to commence house-to-house registration--Chairman"). The extraordinary arrangements that gave rise to GECOM's direct involvement in day-to-day implementation of registration have presumably come to an end and we can revert to absorbing the registration function into the general administration with GECOM's inputs in specification of the data requirements necessary for registering voters. This was the approach that was used before Independence and that obtains today in CARICOM, in America, in Britain, in Canada and in countries all over the world.
The implementation of the registration process by the existing system of public administration provides an opportunity to strengthen the decentralisation of the country's administrative arrangements while maintaining central control. The opportunity to improve in this direction should be taken now.
Modern public administration puts emphasis on the concept of the public administrator as an agent. GECOM should recognise that it can never function as efficiently in the far flung areas of the Rupununi, the Potaro, the Moruca and the North West, Linden, the Corentyne and in the rural areas as public officers who work and live in those areas.
Agency cost theory suggests that public officers should be minimally conflicted in their administrative functions. Returning all executive functions from Regional Chairpersons to the Regional Executive Officers (REOs) in the regions is a first step in minimising conflicts. Relieving the Regional Chairpersons of the responsibility of executive functions releases them to perform more efficiently as politicians. Specialisation of functions into those who are politicians and to those who are administrators will improve efficiency a thousand fold. It would reduce the arbitrariness of pressuring administrators to respond to political imperatives.
This approach to managing the country is the only way to monitor the multitude of activities that take place without the knowledge of Georgetown bound officials such as the bureaucrats in GECOM. It is the only way to prevent the take over of the country by the Brazilians, Malaysians and Colombians in the hinterland who speak English plus their own language. It is the only way to stop the Guyanese loss of their birth right. In another 10 years, foreigners will have more authority in our country than Guyanese especially if we continue to lose over 80% of our graduates.
Two changes to our constitution are required to achieve this efficiency. The first is assigning the responsibility for the appointment of the public service commissions to the political parties in proportion to their strength in Parliament. Oversight of these commissions should be transferred to Parliament. The present untidy arrangement of appointments to the public service commissions by civil service associations should be brought to and end.
The second change is assigning executive authority to the REOs who will report to the permanent secretary of the Ministry responsible for regional and local government operations.
Regional politicians should be trained in the art of politics-identifying opportunities and approaches to development, ensuring fairness in the distribution of resources, representing the causes of people in the regions to the central administration, assisting communities to develop mechanisms to reduce crime and to resolve intra-and inter-community conflicts and providing oversight of regional administrators. There is a lot of political work for regional politicians that should be given a chance to develop if the separation of functions recommended here is pursued.
GECOM should similarly train public officials in the regions, in Georgetown and in New Amsterdam to go from house to house, mine to mine, forest operation to forest operation, farm to farm, business to business, and develop a data base that can be matched to the Census data.
This will be a first step to taking back our country from the alien forces that are at present destroying Guyana. House to-house registration provides a significant opportunity to modernise our administrative arrangements and improve our knowledge of our country. GECOM should be a part of the process but not the whole process. Dr. Surujbally is an expert in veterinary medicine and not in the modern theories of public administration.
Posted
May 12th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
In every multi-racial country, benefits are distributed unfairly to the various races, in part, because of cultural attributes, in part , because of history and, in part, because of the way capitalism works. There always is a clamour for fairness, whether it is called shared governance or affirmative action or partition as occurred between India and Pakistan. The clamour for shared governance becomes louder when those making the decisions on the distribution of resources seem bereft of reason. This is a complicated matter and Mr. Gaskin's shooting from the hip is an indication of his inability to grasp the complexities involved.
To state that the Constitution provides for shared governance between the Central Government and the Regional/Local Levels of Government lacks perception. Ideally, governance should be shared between the executive, the legislative and the administrative branches of government. But, in Guyana, that has never been the case. Mr. Burnham inherited a concentration of those separate powers in the 1966 Constitution and deepened that concentration in the 1980 Constitution. The public service commissions are creatures of the President. The permanent secretaries are creatures of the Ministers and the Regional Chairmen, who wield executive authority, are creatures of the political parties, in a large number of instances, creatures of the President.
It is necessary in Guyana to share power in two dimensions. First, at the level of the executive and, second, at the level of the separate branches of government. Mr. Jagdeo concentrates both aspects in his hands and is guaranteed to continue to concentrate both aspects of power as long as East Indians are in the majority and as long as East Indians continue to vote apan jhat. This makes Mr. Jagdeo a virtual dictator, different from Mr. Burnham only in the authenticity of the majority vote. That is Mr. Phillips's concern. He does not want to entrench a dictator.
But there is another reason why Africans have a right to shared governance. We, Africans, built Guyana. In Scars of Bondage, Eusi Kwayana and Tchaiko Kwayana wrote as follows: "They [ the Africans] had driven back the sea and had cleared, drained and reclaimed 15,000 square miles of forest and swamps. This is equivalent to 9,000,000 acres of land. In short, all the fields on which the sugar estates are now based were cleared, drained and irrigated by African labour forces…The Venn Commission of 1948 noted in its report that to build these coastal plantations alone, a volume of 100,000,000 tons of earth had to be moved by the hands of African slaves in the digging of trenches and irrigation canals."
It is that right, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, to which Mr. Phillips lays claim. That ancestral right is reinforced by the fact of common sense. We remain two pre-nations as Brother Eusi Kwayana described us in 1961 and will not become a nation by the exercise of force over Africans. In addition, the exclusion of talented Guyanese from helping to manage and build the country is tantamount to sheer stupidity.
I remember in 1993 when we worked hard in the IDB to fashion a soft loan of about U.S.$ 80 odd million to rehabilitate the Guyana Electricity Corporation. The loan was designed to rehabilitate transformers, poles, transmission lines, generators and unify the cycles. About U.S.$ 40 million was intended to finance a private sector generating plant. The private entrepreneur would have been required to pay an interest of about 7% while the Government would have been charged about ¾ % on the soft loan. The difference of about 6% would have accrued to the Government's Budget, an annual amount of about U.S.$2.4 million for whatever period the loan remained outstanding.
The Cabinet threw out the offer on the grounds that the 1992 PPP victory was not intended to promote the development of the private sector. A power shared Cabinet would have prevented that stupidity. To this day, electricity supply has not recovered from the mistake of 1993.Executive power sharing would have resulted in greater accountability, less secrecy and less corruption. The forests and the mines would have yielded far greater returns to the country. The flooding disaster of 2005 would have been avoided. The new wharf at Charity would not have floated into the Pomeroon river. The Essequibo river would have been dredged and we would not have witnessed the return to the 19th. Century of having to wait for the high tide to cross from Parika to Adventure.
Power sharing (separation of powers) of the branches of government would democratise governance in a way we have never had the good fortune to experience. Executive power sharing would bring about cohesion of the two pre-nations and maximize the contributions of our talents, instead of the present wasting of talent from the exclusion of well qualified people.
Posted
May 7th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
President Jagdeo, in a Stabroek News report on April 22nd.,urged the Elections Commission and the political parties to proceed with local government elections without undertaking a new national voter registration exercise. One major reason for the President's urging is the prohibitive cost of a new registration exercise.
The much bigger cost is the set of missed opportunities to set up a system to manage elections without donor assistance. The President will go down in history as outstanding if he succeeds in de-politicising the public services and in putting in place a decentralised administration that can monitor the whole country, collect taxes from everywhere and be a catalyst for development. An improved administration would be able to undertake elections as is done in CARICOM without foreign financing. The time to think through the necessary changes is now.
Achieving effective decentralisation will possibly take as much two years. But when it is complete, a new registration list can be prepared with the cost of just overtime payments to the public servants in the Regions. In Georgetown and New Amsterdam, the city and town councils can assume responsibility for registration in the wards.
Consider the advantage of knowing with a considerable degree of accuracy the population in each Amerindian village, in each forestry and mining concession, in each village, in each rural community other than a village, and in each ward in Georgetown and in New Amsterdam. Consider the advantage of all the Regions being linked to Georgetown via computers. Is there no passion for modernising governance? The drug barons manage their operations with modern equipment. Why don't we do the same?
Sitting on the President's desk is an IMF Working Paper which laments the fact that growth in Guyana has stopped. The Working Paper observes a persistent decline in factor accumulation. Factors did not accumulate because investment dried up in the unfriendly investment environment after Mr. Hoyte left office and because skills migrated when they were mistreated.
But the most important explanation is ignorance. The very industries that contributed to growth in the early 1990s extracted wealth when they realised that we are dummies. Mr. Joseph Tyndall estimated a withdrawal of telecommunications resources of nearly half a billion U.S. dollars in the first 10 years of operation. Ms. Bulkan and Professor Ramdas have lamentations of similar withdrawals by forest companies but they have not quantified their estimates .There are huge mismatches between Guyana's records of forest exports and the corresponding imports by recipient countries. Omai seems to have had a field day from inadequate monitoring. Garimpeiros come and go, taking out what they please. How can factors accumulate with such carelessness in administration and with such an absence in monitoring? There is no system in place to manage our huge geographical base.
Blame must be placed on the Opposition as well. Why should Mr. Tyndall, Ms. Bulkan, Professor Ramdas and Mr. P. Q. DeFreitas know more than the PNCR? The Government is careless and corrupt and the Opposition is asleep.
Local authorities are victims of this mal-functioning because infrastructure maintenance is neglected. Both major parties are too pre-occupied with winning elections and are likely to contribute only divisiveness in the communities when they should be functioning as catalysts to enterprise development. The President and the Leader of the Opposition need to take a "time out", as the Americans would say, from elections and concentrate on empowering people through their local government organs to develop as small entrepreneurs.
Development is a complex process which requires hard thinking rather than robot like administrative responses. We shot our selves in the foot, as Mr. Dev says, when the local government system was re-conceived in 1969 and 1981. Fundamental changes are required and the time to make systemic changes is now.
Posted
May 4th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Kaieteur News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear
Editor,
I have promised Dr.Roopnarine to deal with this topic in November
but the imperatives of Mr. Dev's column and the unwise plunging
into Local Government elections warrant this preliminary treatment.
In the Ravi Dev column published in Kaieteur News on April 29th dealing with "The Economic Question," Mr. Dev. has "soared" ( to use a memorable term), indicating a genuine desire to search for a system in Guyana that can deliver "equitable political, social and economic democracy." Mr. Dev recognises that it is hypocritical to claim that political democracy prevails when it is not accompanied by social and economic democracy. In respect of economic democracy, this means more than the right to work. It means the right and the ability to choose the kind of work consistent with the "essential freedom to enquire and create." It means the potential for the manual worker, as Mr. Dev. pointed out, "to define his reality." In his article, "On Organisation," (March 11th) Mr. Dev noted that "the intellectual will be everyone who will be willing to reflect and participate in changing his / her reality-the butcher, the baker and yes, even the much-maligned cane cutter."
The cane cutter is central to the economic democracy problem. Why must the cane-cutter remain for ever being "much maligned" ? "To reflect and to participate in changing his / her reality," it is necessary to change the plantation mode which has been with us for nearly 400 years and which is being deepened and entrenched in the investment operations in Skeldon.
If the plantation mode is democratised, then the much maligned cane cutter will not change his reality by reflecting vicariously on some imagined experience. He will be the owner of a part of what is now known as the sugar estate and will be free to determine whether he should continue to produce sugar or some other more profitable crop. The cane cutter will then be enjoying economic democracy in addition to the political democracy that he now supposedly has.
The equally important consideration is that this approach revolutionises the top-down hierarchy of the plantation and can change the dependency relation on the remnants of imperialism. The buyers of sugar in the United Kingdom have not sought to develop the industry by diversification of end products as Professor Clive Thomas's research has indicated is possible. They have refrained from participating in the Skeldon operation, indicating thereby little confidence in the future of the industry. In effect, it is necessary to conceive of economic democracy not only in terms of the flexibility to be accorded to the much maligned cane cutter but also in relation to the transformation of a 400 year dependency relation with imperialism.
The transformation of the sugar cane field operations should be accompanied by a co-operative share holding of the field transportation arrangements and of the factory operations. It is clear that these changes will take years. Hence Mr. Dev's belief that I will be troubled by "means and ends." I agree that means will be difficult. Apportioning of fields to cane cutters who will become cane farmers will be a long term process that should be undertaken gradually. The ownership and control of punts should be organised as co-operatives. The maintenance of the infrastructure will require community councils. The management of the factories should be contracted out to expert firms as is done at present until management expertise within the country can undertake the management task with training for factory ownership and operations. Economic democracy will mean economic independence.
The agenda is a formidable one. But this is the way that the industry is organised in Belize. And it works. It works in that manner also in the United States and in Australia. The change should be gradual and it should be underpinned with training of the farmers, the managers of the co-operatives, the factory workers and the factory managers.
The model of ownership of farms can be carried across to the rice industry where a quasi-plantation mode exists in the large land holdings of estate owners who rent their farms to small farmers. These farmers can, in a similar manner, share ownership of the rice mills with the present owners of the rice mills.
The sequence of changes in the rice industry may well be different in that viable rice farms may require to be larger than the present small holdings. Sizes of farms that can earn the holders at least an amount of U.S. $600 per month should be aimed at.
Flexibility in the rice farming opportunities can be achieved if it is possible to make changes to grow alternative crops like fruits or health food products or even to grow rice for the growing organic food market.
All of this requires research. The change will not be immediate. As Mr. Dev points out, the education system should consider training for these operations as part of the school curriculum. The university and the research institutes will concentrate on curricula for sugar and rice agronomy but also for the cultivation of selected varieties of guavas, mangoes, cherries, pineapples, passion fruit, papaws, aloe vera, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, cashews, sorrel and coconut water.
Marketing and processing and labeling skills will be part of the education infrastructure to support the transformation of the agricultural sector. The requirements for this change include a heightened efficiency in drainage and irrigation, much above the capabilities of the present staff in charge of defending the coastland.
This emphasis is not inconsistent with a gradual move into the higher land. If intelligently managed, continued existence on the coast can be profitable and finance the move inland.
It might surprise Mr. Dev that I did not outline the village scenario first since I regard the villages with the greatest affection. I am merely exhibiting a sense of proportion. The bulk of the agricultural lands is occupied by sugar. Rice is second. East Indian agriculture of fruits and vegetables is third. Villages are fourth.
Even though villages are fourth, there is no area where economic democracy is more crucial for the well being of Africans. The villages should not be smothered continuously by the present governance arrangements that do not respect their ancestry and their potential to be economically independent by producing fruits and health food products, by processing them, by packaging them and by exporting to the United States and to Europe. The villages can rise to third place or even come second if they are given the opportunity.
It is a crime to continue to suffocate these opportunities in villages with moribund elections as Messrs Jagdeo and Corbin are now planning because they wish to put a joint squeeze on the AFC. When the economic democracy prospects are set out in this scope, with this complexity, with this need for research, with this demand for training, with this reformulation of education packages, with this processing potential, with this need for economic freedom "to enquire and to create," it is clear that we are dealing with political backwardness in the PPP and in the PNCR if they are oblivious to these prospects.
On March 2nd, Stabroek News published a letter from Andaiye which was captioned: "In defence of the vendors outside Stabroek Market, especially the grass roots women; in defence of justice." Her concern was as follows: "Who or where is the source of authority for decisions related to the city?"
That is the problem which has to be addressed by a more thorough going Local Government reform review than we have had so far. A more appropriate decision making system is necessary for the villages as well. These reforms should fit into the depoliticisation and decentralisation arrangement that I have already outlined.
The point about economic democracy is that it consists of small and medium sized operations in contrast to the large enterprises of the huge transnationals. Co-operatives as suggested by Eusi Kwayana in the early 1960s provide the basis for efficient functioning of the many clusters of operations. Large scale operations will continue to be necessary where the technology requires such operations but the scope for small and medium sized enterprises is immense. Properly conceived, "the small man can be a real man."
Posted
March 25th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is lending Guyana U.S. $52 million for Competitiveness and Justice Sector Modernisation programmes. (See Stabroek News Report of March 22nd.) Competitiveness will improve from a virtuous circle of inter-connected changes in a wide range of factors and cannot be addressed directly in a single programme.
Weak education systems, an inefficient civil service, all round incompetence that leads to the Cricket World Cup Committee's handling of the Guyana operations, calamitous drainage and irrigation operations, and arbitrariness in governance are among the many factors affecting competitiveness. They require programmes to overhaul political power relations, greater participation of competent people who are now excluded from government, de-politicisation of the public services, decentralisation of government and widespread computerisation of the government offices.
The problems are systemic and not primarily market price related. U.S. $27 million will fill the pockets of a few consultants and politicians but will leave us just as uncompetitive as we are now.
The weakness in programme design is evident in the fact that the Justice Sector Modernisation Programme appears un-connected from the Competitiveness Programme when, in fact, they are integrally related. Justice Sector improvement is an element of the institutional framework that underpins competitiveness by providing recourse in the execution of contracts. But the present justice system is compromised by its justification of the unconstitutionality of the Government and by its preventing that unconstitutionality from being tested in the Caribbean Court of Justice.
That upholding of a major illegality is a result of the failure to separate the power of the Minister as a legislator from his power as the head of the Ministry. That separation will be possible only when the public services are de-politicised and public servants are independent in terms of personnel relations from the President. Public service independence does not mean a capability to defy a Minister but it does mean the application of analyses and information to reduce arbitrariness and bias of a Minister's actions.
Public service independence in personnel relations is possible when the public servant is confident that her or his promotion and tenure in the job do not depend on the pleasure of the President. Public servants in Guyana should not serve at the pleasure of the President. The law should be changed to give effect to their independence.
The IDB has reportedly complained that it has lent Guyana more than one billion U.S.dollars but does not have much to show for all that money. These two projects help to explain why outcomes are disappointing. Loan design does not draw on the best Guyanese skills that are available nor from the best ideas that have been, and are being, discussed.
But this Government is isolationist internally because of its winner-take-all mentality and unprincipled because of its reliance on narcotic relations. Conventional donor programmes are not compatible with this environment and amount to being a waste of money. Donors have to face the fact that 50 years of racial strife have deformed the society and patch work approaches will not work. We have to reform internally by restoring constitutionality and by drastically reducing our dependence on narcotics.
Posted
March 12th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Kaieteur News
Georgetown, Guyana
The insults of Dr.Tara Singh that have been hurled at Brother Eusi Kwayana should be unreservedly withdrawn.(See" Shri Gossai is a charismatic leader, a man blessed with humility"in SN , March 9th.) Kwayana is, without any doubt, the most honest political activist in Guyana's history. He has not been known to change his loyalty to principle. In the early history of the PPP, in the struggle between Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham for the premiership of the country, Kwayana stuck with Cheddi Jagan in a manner that was far more principled than Jagan ever showed in his behaviour to Kwayana. To this day, Kwayana has not enlightened us about all that he knows about Dr.Jagan because he sees no worth in character assassination. Dr.Singh's character assassination of Kwayana is despicable and unworthy of someone with his standing. I defy Dr. Singh to point to one single act of Kwayana's long political activism that can be considered shameful.
To say that Kwayana remained silent during the Burnham years is utter nonsense. Does Singh know of the many battles that Kwayana waged against Burnham single handedly and in the WPA against the PNC regime? Does Singh recall the many fasts that Kwayana undertook to call attention to the destruction being wrought on the country by our racial wars? Does Singh recall the action that Kwayana took with David Hinds and Andaiye to protest against violence against Indians? Does Singh recognise that it calls for extraordinary courage to stand up to the members of your own race and say to them, "You are wrong." This is courage that ,in my debate with Singh, he never demonstrated.
Kwayana is an African. He believes as much in his identity as Singh believes in his. The appointment of Gossai crosses the line between spirituality(church) and the state in a manner that is suggestive of exclusion of the faiths of Africans and Amerindians. It is unwise. As I have argued in my letters in response to Mr.Ravi Dev, Guyana is not an Indian Ethnic state, at least not yet. The state in Guyana should not foster one religion and not another.
I made the mistake when I was at the World Bank of dangerously crossing that line between spirituality and state. I was an ardent transcendental meditator of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi school. Dr. Kurleigh King of Barbados was a leading member of the Maharishi establishment. But it was Mr. Patterson, Maharishi's assistant, who approached me to ask Mr.Hoyte to assist in the promotion of TM in Guyana. There was a good case for TM. A relationship had been set up between the TM movement and the Mozambique Government. There were reports of the reduction in recidivism that resulted from the practice of TM in prisons in Africa. TM is accepted as treatment for stress relief in the U.S. and qualifies for insurance coverage in the U.S. Mr. Hoyte, however, was not inclined to take up the Maharishi offer.
When Dr.Jagan assumed the presidency in 1992, the TM people repeated their request. I approached Dr.Jagan who told me that his nephew was then a TM practitioner. One of his advisers in the Presidential Secretariat told a friend of mine that I made the approach to Dr.Jagan because I was pandering to preserve my job and that he would expose my obsequiousness to the Guyanese public. I was hoping that the ignoramus would do any such thing but better counsel prevailed. Dr.Jagan was, like Mr. Hoyte, unwilling to take up the Maharishi offer.
There is a big difference between the Maharishi offer and the Gossai appointment. TM is a meditative technique practiced by all races. Emphasize, all races. As noted above, Dr.Kurleigh King was a leader in the TM movement. Dr. John Hagelin, an outstanding physicist is a leader of the TM Yogic Flying group that is assembled at various places because they feel that their presence will promote peace. TM originated from an Indian but it is not exclusively Indian.
Despite those very strong credentials, on reflection, I was wrong to suggest to Mr. Hoyte and to Dr.Jagan that they should give assistance in promoting the TM movement in Guyana. It was crossing the line between spirituality (religion, church) and the state. It would certainly be advantageous if many politicians took up the TM practice. They would stop stealing and would become trustworthy. But, in the circumstances in Guyana, it is not the role of the state to foster spirituality even when it can be advantageous.
I have reflected on multi-racialism, particularly in my recent debate with Mr.Dev. Racial prejudice is a particularly deep-seated emotion that is not easily removed from the human breast. Guyana is not an Indian Ethnic state. If there is a desire to function as a Western state with a substantial Indian population and reduce racial prejudice, efforts have to be made to root out racial bias in state operations wherever it occurs. It was the church that destroyed Africa with its oozing piousness. Under the cover of piousness, Africans were hoodwinked into surrendering their birthright. The piousness of Mr.Gossai is likely to have similar soporific effects. Mr.Gossai does not have the multi-racial reach of TM. Gossai is confined to one race and one race only.
A one-race Presidential Secretariat is an unenlightened proposition. I think the spiritual dimension is important but spirituality should not be pursued by the modern state. Society has had a long history of the horrors that resulted from the power of the mystique of religious men, like born again Christians. From the worship that Gossai is already receiving, we are in danger of being ruled by a mystique that will not be easily reduced to rationality. Brother Kwayana is correct.
Posted
February 13th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Kaieteur News
Georgetown, Guyana
We must thank Mr. Dev. for his comprehensive presentation of the thinking behind the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) which, as Mr. Dev points out, is not an organ of the state of India but an independent body that hopes to work along with the Government of India. What is missing from Mr. Dev's presentation is a succinct statement of the aim of the GOPIO. There is, however, an indication of lofty concepts such as "Political Responsibility and Involvement" and "Socio-cultural aspects of Assimilation of People of Indian Origin."
As I implied in my last letter, this agenda does not concern me except in so far as it prevents us from striving towards racial parity in Guyana. In that regard, it may be useful, I suggested, if the GOPIO can assist in the reduction of the deficiencies of Hinduism which retard progress towards racial equity because inequality is believed to be divinely ordained.
Mr. Dev is sanguine in respect of my concern and points to successful billionaire business tycoons in India-from all castes-who have prospered, despite caste, by seizing opportunities in the free enterprise system in the period of about two decades since the institution of the GOPIO.
Cause and effect are not delineated in Mr. Dev's letter. In fact, to the extent that a causal relation is considered, Mr. Dev, in relieving the Government of responsibility for striving towards racial parity, places emphasis on the synergies of lowered transaction costs within ethnic communities. The truth is that the advantages within ethnic communities result more powerfully from a culture that thrives in market friendly environments. Contrary to the suggestion that governments can do nothing about this, Mr. Dev should read the achievements in Singapore where the Government has intervened by strengthening the education system for Malays. In Malaysia, the Government continues to strive towards racial equality by instituting targets for business ownership by Malays vis-à-vis the Chinese. In regard to the central position of my correspondence on this issue, Mr. Dev has not shifted much from the divine ordination of inequality. My "desideratum" in respect of attacking the iniquities of caste is therefore on target. Habits of thought die hard. Despite his best intentions, Mr. Dev is a victim of the predisposition to accept inequalities as pre-ordained.
Other disappointments abound in Mr. Dev's letter. The laudable GOPIO concept of "Political Responsibility and Involvement" has not made much impact on the leadership of the PPP, even though President Jagdeo is a senior member of the GOPIO. Mr. Dev can attest to the brutal treatment meted out to ROAR by the PPP in the electoral struggle. Will the GOPIO ever have an impact on "political responsibility." ? That is not likely if Mr. Freddie Kissoon's observations of the management style of Mr. Jagdeo are accurate. (See Freddie Kissoon "A strange thing happened in the PPP a month ago.").(KN, Feb 11th, 2007)
Equally problematic is the objective of dealing with the "Socio-cultural aspects of Assimilation of People of Indian Origin." Is "assimilation" the appropriate concept? Or should it be "integration" ? Is it assimilation of all Indians in the Diaspora into one united Indian community or is it the "integration" of Indians into the communities in which they live? "Assimilation" may well mean "bonding Diaspora relations first" and bothering about other community relations after. The exclusiveness associated with the GOPIO activities in Guyana is consistent with bonding among Indians first and letting the chips fall where they may.
I am indeed hypersensitive. But my hypersensitivity is not "reflexively offensive"; it is "reflexively defensive." I do not suffer from the fear that "Indians would be pushed in front of Africans." Indians are already in front of Africans and the PPP is deliberately pushing them further in front by using the flawed PNC inspired constitution.
When Mr. Dev refers to me as a patriot, I am not flattered because in the Kwayana "two pre-nation concept," I can be a patriot only to the African pre-nation, awaiting any opportunity to work together to soar. But that opportunity will not come with the "micro-managing" Bharrat Jagdeo. (See Freddie Kissoon's portrayal). In terms of the Kantian Critique, Mr. Dev's "imposing edifice of thought" rests on the foundation of exclusivity and inegalitarianism.
Like Mr. Bisram, Mr. Dev invokes supposed African parallels in the Pan-African Congresses since 1900 and in Mr. Eric Phillips's and ACDA's present African Renaissance fashioned after Mr. Mandela's concept of the same name. The parallelism is superficial. Dr. Kimani Nehusi and many others have inscribed in our lexicon the concept of mental enslavement which Indians and Chinese escaped. The tragedy of mental enslavement is that it can be permanent as is evidenced in the hiring of Africans to kill Africans.
Alice Walker in "We are the Ones We have been Waiting For" refers to the crimes committed against Africans that would drive the sanest person mad. The crimes include (1) the destruction of African worship (thank Heavens, Hindu worship was never banned); (2) the enslavement of African children; (3) the eradication of the African image (the Hindu images have been enshrined by the colonisers); (4) the sacking of the African homeland (which continues to this day); (5) the raping and murder of African daughters (in evidence in Guyana today); and (6) the raping and murder of the sons of Africa.
Much of the pillage, murder and raping occurred under the blessing of the priests and other so-called religious guides who, we now know, were not merely witnesses but participants in much of the destruction and desecration. The sodomising of thousands of young men in Africa by degenerate white priests is a heinous crime that has deformed many Africans who are now required to govern their countries.
Pan Africanasm, for these reasons, needs to be more "assimilatory" in the sense in which I interpreted the GOPIO concept above. The GOPIO know who they are. The Africans are not sure.
"Assimilation" for conscious Africans is "defensive." Indians can be "offensive" in the GOPIO and can move on to "integration." Mr. Dev's federalist concept was a step in that direction. When Nehusi, Hinds and I translated Dev's "federal" concept into constitutional change for empowerment of African villages and Indian communities, Mr. Dev disappeared. He seemed afraid of "integration" from the grass roots upwards.
For us "to work together to soar," we need systemic change. We need to change the PNC designed constitution to put a hold on the new dictatorship. The GOPIO, mindful of its commitment to "Political Responsibility and Involvement," should find recommending constitutional change one practical example of "beginning with the wider social context." The other is to remove the divine ordination of inequality. As is evident in one as enlightened as Mr. Dev, that is not easy. The inequality slips back into what he conceives as an integral aspect of the modern round of globalisation.
Posted
February 6th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Kaieteur News
Georgetown, Guyana
The debate in the letter "Ellis's distortion on GOPIO university" (KN, Feb 3rd,) is one on race in Guyana between a surrogate for the East Indians, George Cudjoe, and an African, Clarence Ellis. Cudjoe would like to give the impression that he is arguing an African position but only someone from Mars would conclude that Cudjoe is arguing an African position.
Before I spell out the essential elements of the debate, I must apologise for misreading Mr. Vishnu Bisram. I was wrong to conclude that the GOPIO were contemplating the establishment of a university in Guyana for East Indians. Thank heavens, that preposterous idea is not likely. The establishment of the university in India seems equally preposterous but that is not my concern.
There are at least five elements in the Cudjoe / Ellis debate. The first is the need for a commitment to achieving racial parity. The second is the revelation of history that can make all the races feel proud, but moreso the Africans who were the first civilised people and whose achievements in Egypt were falsified, primarily by white people, to destroy the memory of a Negro Egypt. The third is the role of racial pride in fighting racist domination. The fourth element is the likelihood of benefits from addressing deficiencies in Hinduism by the GOPIO. The fifth element is the use of slander to split good relations between Africans.
My letter, reviled by Cudjoe, opened with the statement that the Government of Guyana has an obligation to ensure that GOPIO assistance to East Indians does not lead to further racial imbalances. This offends Cudjoe who accuses me of writing as if I am a representative of African people. As far as I know, I am entitled to speak as an African. I made that suggestion in respect of reducing racial imbalances because it is an obvious approach to take if racial harmony is to be achieved. My central point is not addressed systematically in the various reports by Bisram.
The second element arose out of my suggestion for Institutes related to race (financed in part by the GOPIO) and the work that can be done to correct falsified history. In that regard, Runoko Rashidi observes: "Since the first modern humans were of African birth, the African presence globally can be demonstrated through the history of the Black populations that have inhabited the world within the span of recent humanity……… [T] here is abundant evidence to show that Black people created and sustained many of the world's earliest and most enduring civilisations. Such was the case in India."
Cudjoe advises me not to tread in those areas. One would have thought that, in dealing with other races, Cudjoe would have welcomed more knowledge of his ancestry. That he is reluctant to do so, reinforces my suspicions about his African-ness.
The third element follows on from the second. A better education which will result from work in the Institutes will enhance racial pride which is the strongest weapon in fighting racist domination. For Cudjoe, an African, to welcome Bisram in his arms at anytime, is an indication of gaps in his history. Only last week, I was told of an offer made to the Guyana Government to keep a Government official employed for 3 years with overseas money to pay the salaries. The offer was turned down. Scholarships were offered that would have gone primarily to African Guyanese. The scholarships were turned down. A letter in the press on Feb 3rd is asking the President to save the youth in Region 10 from devastation. That is the region where the Government neglected the bauxite industry while giving every encouragement to the sugar industry. The Government insists on retiring people at the age of 55 when they are in their prime because the older government servants are African who will make way for younger entrants who will be mostly East Indian. In the face of these stories and thousands more indicating African marginalisation, I will embrace Bisram if he shows the courage to fight for racial equality.
Eric Phillips has recently set out positions in an African Renaisance to make racial pride consistent with African advance in business and social development. Cudjoe would do well to visit Mr. Phillips and learn about being an African.
The fourth element of this debate is the one that the GOPIO may find it beneficial to examine the deficiencies in the Hindu culture that may be responsible for the social trauma in countries like Fiji, Mauritius and Guyana. A dialogue in respect of culture is perhaps the most important service that the GOPIO can render to East Indians in the diaspora.
In that regard, I have not seen Mr. Kowlessar's refutation of my Dalit argument. In further support of my Dalit comment, I wish to quote Mr. Manmohan Singh in the Asia Times of April 28th, 2006. Mr. Singh urged Indian businesses to reserve jobs for the Dalits. "The suggestion came amid debate on quotas for castes broadly categorised as Other Backward Castes………Now the government is asking the private sector to extend quotas." If the GOPIO can ask the private sector in Guyana to establish quotas for all races, the GOPIO intervention would be consistent with the requirement to aim at racial parity as indicated at the beginning of my letter.
The fifth element is the skunk like practice of linking Africans to negative racial slurs to discredit them. In this instance, I am referring to the linking of me with the "Kean Gibsonian" type flawed logic and twisting of facts. Cudjoe is not going to separate me from what is important about Dr. Gibson's work. Dr. Gibson and I have different approaches to analysing the problem of East Indian discrimination and notions of superiority. While Dr. Gibson was still in diapers, I was studying E.R. Leach's seminal thesis that caste was the only stratification system in the world that justified the stratification schema on the basis of religion. Dr. Gibson comes to an understanding of the social differentiation issue from the perspective of philosophy. Her analysis should be used in conjunction with Leach's more anthropological work. These investigations ought to be continued to understand our differences and our similarities.
In that regard, I would like Cudjoe to set out every piece of my writing and show me where I am heaping scorn on Indian people in everything that I write. That would re-expose my work to Guyanese audiences and re-emphasize my requests for fairness in the distribution of social benefits. Please, Mr. Cudjoe, show me where I have been a bigot.
From these observations, GOPIO intervention can be consistent with achieving racial parity. But that consistency will depend on our better grasp of our histories and our social tendencies. Paradoxically the consistency will best be achieved if the GOPIO starts with the wider social context and works inwards to the diaspora relations.
Posted
February 1st. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Kaieteur News
Georgetown, Guyana
In this matter of assistance by the Government of India to East Indians in Guyana, the Government of Guyana has an obligation to ensure that such assistance does not lead to further racial imbalances. Mr. Vishnu Bisram, in his letter captioned "Guyana's relationship with India is an asset to Guyana." (R.N. Jan 30th), refutes Mr. Colin Bascom's critique of the relations. Mr. Bisram's refutation, however, reveals an insensitivity to racial parity that we Africans are required to expose whenever we see it.
Consider, for example, the inane suggestion that Ghana and Nigeria establish a university for Bisram's "African brethren." The scorn in the brotherhood concept is evident throughout Bisram's letter but that is not the important point. If Ghana and Nigeria did have that capability, East Indians would have found every means to resist it. And they would have good reason for doing so. A separate university for East Indians and one for Africans would deepen racial divisiveness.
That fact that Ghana and Nigeria are in no position to establish a university for Africans in Guyana does not reduce the divisiveness that would result from establishing a university for East Indians only. Bisram uses sleight of hand in discussing the racial composition at the proposed East Indian university. He argues that the availability of more Indian slots at the university in Guyana will make more scholarships available for Africans in India. By this reasoning, we will have the ridiculous situation of Africans trekking 6000 miles to India for scholarships when they are denied entry into the East Indian university at home which is on average 20 miles away. Guyanese society will thus pay a high price for the establishment of a purely East Indian university in Guyana.
The Guyana Government, as noted earlier, has an obligation to racial parity and to hold the GOPIO to a similar standard. Having demonstrated that a university for East Indians only is divisive, it is useful to suggest how the aims of the GOPIO can be achieved in the context of policies for racial equivalence. That possibility exists if the GOPIO assistance is given to the revitalising of the run down campus at Turkeyen and to the establishment of an Institute of East Indian Studies which can be devoted to studies in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, and other Indian languages. In that context, contributions form African countries for the establishment of an Institute of African Studies makes sense. Resources should be sought also for an Institute of Amerindian Studies.
These institutes can provide material for the texts for our children to help them to establish their identity. African children will learn from those texts that Egypt was the cradle of civilisation and, by the almost unanimous testimony of ancient historians, the Egyptians belonged to an African race. White imperialists later sought to destroy the memory of a Negro Egypt. Africans journeyed to places as far away as India and gave rise to descendants in India that today bear that African imprint. East Indians will learn of the birth of the diverse philosophies and social arrangements that proliferate the sub-continent. These texts will generate racial pride which is the best weapon for fighting racist domination.
The narrowness of the racial perspectives of Jagdeo, Bisram, Vajpayee and the GOPIO shuts out these nobler prospects. Africans should therefore oppose this East Indian university idea vigorously, not because they object to Indian distinctiveness but because they object to the opportunities that will be missed for a much greater enlightenment.
African organisations in Guyana should indicate to the GOPIO that East Indians in Guyana are not a self-contained island and that the last 50 years have witnessed a struggle for racial fairness and social equity. African organisations should point out to the GOPIO that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced to the Indian society in January 2006 that measures will be taken to ensure that the Dalits are treated as equals. It will be ironic if India is finding ways to accommodate the Dalits and, at the same time, is exporting an ill-thought out scheme that will result in racial divisiveness in Guyana.
The GOPIO has to ask why East Indian divisiveness has led to social trauma in Fiji, Mauritius and Guyana. Considerable discomfort has resulted from East Indian migration to the islands in the West Indies, particularly in Barbados. The divisiveness has been contained where East Indians are in competition with Chinese in places like Singapore and Malaysia. The GOPIO will do well to explore deficiencies in the culture of Hinduism and be wary in launching assistance programmes in the diaspora that are dysfunctional in respect of the efforts to achieve racial parity. An East Indian university in Guyana is certainly not the way to proceed.
Posted
February 1st. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
While one must agree with Parvati Persaud-Edwards's aspiration to reach the realms of humanity of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi-- (See letter "Shri Prakash Gossai can make a contribution;" SN, January 25th, 2007)-two weaknesses in Persaud-Edwards's argumentation should be noticed. The first is that King, much more so than Gandhi, anchored his campaign on the desirability of racial parity. Gandhi was imprisoned by the inegalitarianism of the caste system, which he could not assail, and accordingly settled for the categorisation of the Dalits as Harijans (God's people).
The second is that both Gandhi and King were quite prepared to be confrontational. The distinguishing feature of both men is that they endeavoured to resolve conflicts without resort to violence. Persaud-Edwards recognises situations in Guyana that are intolerable and that result in migration. Those situations should be confronted.
A more fundamental difficulty is that Persaud-Edwards sees Hinduism as pure, sublime, perennial and enduring and subject to no sublimation. I am not sure what is meant by "no sublimation" but it is generally held by Hindu thinkers that there are deficiencies in Hinduism that fail to elevate "the principle of Being, (all Being) as the absolute Reality." (Maharishi Mahesi-Yogi in "A Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, p. 10). In other words, there is no superiority of brahmin Being over chudra Being. One would hope that Shri Prakash Gossai can address those deficiencies and uplift Hindu thinking in Guyana to reach the realms of humanity of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, but moreso King than Gandhi, because of King's nobler focus on the centrality of racial equality. If that is Gossai's task, it is huge.
This gives rise to a second fundamental difficulty, namely the absence of terms of reference for Shri Prakash Gossai. Is he expected to strengthen Hindu culture so that Hindus can interact with Africans, Amerindians, Brazilians and Colombians with greater confidence? If that is his mission, does President Jagdeo expect to appoint an African guru and an Amerindian guru to his office? Was this decision discussed with the Opposition leaders?
The bias to East Indian primacy in Persaud-Edwards's letter is disturbing. The President is president to all the races, not just to East Indians. For one who appears to be an admirable person, Persaud-Edwards is not aware of the hate that results from total exclusion in decision making. The President should realise that a single person like Gossai will not produce racial harmony. The President's commitment to racial parity will do so if it is followed through with the appropriate policies. Gossai can help but the full involvement of all Guyanese-East Indian, African, Amerindian, and Portuguese-is central to the process of racial peace.
Posted
January 23rd. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
When I see the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the Jagdeo dictatorship gradually increases authoritarianism in Guyana, I am reminded of the quote from Pastor Martin Niemoller(1892-1984)
" First, they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
"Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up for me."
Dictatorship is a creeping phenomenon. It can be stopped only when its potential victims are principled and will object to wrongdoing whenever it occurs. Stabroek News made the mistake of excusing wrongdoing for several extenuating reasons. The PPP began with ethnic cleansing in 1993.In 14 years, the PPP has totally transformed the ethnic leadership of the administration. It did not happen in one year. It was a ruthless continuous process. But voices, including Stabroek News, were silent because the victims were Burnham's people who were justly being punished, in their view, for thriving under Burnham's authoritarianism. Racism was cleverly exploited at the same time by spreading the comforting notion that "Africans will not rule again." It did not strike those appeased by racism ,including Stabroek News, that two wrongs do not produce a right.
It is now evident that the ruling clique intends to govern for its own gain and for the gain of its foreign narcotic friends and that all obstacles, including Stabroek News, have to get out of its way. Much more repression is on the way if Stabroek News and the Opposition parties do not clamour for systemic change. The trick of the dictatorship is to distract attention by setting up straw men, like cricket and VAT which absorb all the criticisms of the Government within the context of the present system of governance. In the meantime, grass roots democracy is being suppressed by a dysfunctional local government system that is being entrenched by, for example, the publication of a news sheet in Region Six that deepens the dysfunctionality as people look to the news sheet and its publishers for solutions to their problems.
Another example of that repression is Mr. Robert Williams's plaintive plea to the Government to be eased of its financial constraint by begging for more Government money. As my friend, Mr. P.Q.De Freitas puts it. That is what Jagdeo wants to see .You must grovel as Mr. Williams is now doing.
The solution to Georgetown's financial problems does not lie in groveling. In the first instance, the City Council should demand from President Jagdeo an immediate dredging of the harbour to restore drainage and irrigation to the standards that were achieved in colonial times and to remove the mosquito menace that has taken over the city. As a country boy who attended high school in Georgetown, I remember that the major distinguishing feature of Georgetown was that there were no mosquitoes in Georgetown. Mr. Williams should tell Mr. Jagdeo that any thing short of a comprehensive drainage and irrigation scheme for the City is unacceptable. This must be a major City Council campaign.
The second major City Council campaign must be the payment of taxes by the Government for all Government buildings, including buildings of embassies and legations. I had suggested to the cringing Mayor Green that there should be progressivity in the property taxes levied on the city property .This would mean that the Government would be liable for huge amounts of taxes in respect of buildings such as the U.S. and Russian and Chinese embassies which do not pay taxes because of the Geneva Convention. However, these buildings give rise to City Council costs and the Government is responsible for meeting those costs on behalf of the embassies.
This approach will make the City Council flush with cash. This approach is not taken because of sheer intellectual laziness and sheepishness in the Mayor and Deputy Mayor. Frankly, they are a disgrace to Mr. Burnham's upbringing.
The third campaign must be the change in the method of representation in the city from the present single constituency basis to a ward representation arrangement. Both Messrs. Jagdeo and Corbin would resist this change because it reduces the authority of the political party leaders in respect of the elected councilors. But the ward representation arrangement makes the elected councilors more accountable to the citizens.
The fourth campaign must be the clarification of the respective powers of the Government and the City Council. The Government should have no business whatever in deciding on contracts for City Council works. I remember attending a meeting of the President and the city vendors when he mentioned that the Government was withholding City Council taxes because the City Council was likely to pay it out in wages. Both the President's arbitrariness and his contempt for the City Council are deplorable. What should prevail is a preparation of a budget by the City Council that is submitted to the Central Government for consistency with the national macro-economy.When the overall spending levels are agreed upon, the Government should have no further say in the award of contracts as long as the City Council follows the proper guidelines for awarding contracts.
Will Stabroek News champion this agenda? Will the political parties fight for these changes or will they draw into a corner and say as Pastor Martin Niemoller did , "This is not my area of concern. Leave that to the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor".Will the political party leaders strive to preserve their own authority by resisting ward representation?
These are some of the grass roots changes that are necessary to begin staving off Jagdeo's dictatorship. As is implied, it is not only Jagdeo's dictatorship. In a subsidiary manner, to the extent that the political party leaders resist ward representation, they are junior partners in the dictatorship.
The dictatorship can be reversed if steps like the ones outlined in this letter are taken.We have to move ultimately to power sharing at the national level but we can make progress also with significant changes in grass roots democratisation. A number of us, Dr. David Hinds, Dr.Kimani Nehusi and myself have been preaching for years at the altar of grass roots reform. In that regard, we are following in the footsteps of our mentor, Brother Eusi Kwayana. Will our cries be heeded or will we wait until there is no one left to speak? If Jagdeo gets away with further authoritarianism, we should not blame Jagdeo. We should blame our leaders for their permitting his tyranny.
Posted
January 16th. 2007
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
The question should be asked, "When will the IFIs and the donors learn?" Nobel prize winner Ronald Coase had criticised the IFIs for not understanding the importance of a proper institutional framework when Russia was transitioning from a non-market economy to a market economy. The World Bank took Coase's observation to heart and published a document, "Institutions Matter." That document has apparently been thrown aside as Guyana transitions to improvements in its fiscal operations.
The porosity of the borders, the enclave operations of foreigners, narcotic dealers, pirates on our local shores, and a general climate of lawlessness are institutional derogations that have to be removed or substantially reduced if the VAT is to be effective.
Do the IFIs and the donors not recognise that Guyana, in addition to being lawless, is in an unrelenting pursuit of a racial struggle that manifests itself in the willingness of the government to prefer unprincipled operations? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the donor community intervened to correct the bias of unfairness and they need to do so now. The mantra for the late 1980s and early 1990s was free and fair elections. The mantra for now should be racial parity.
President Jagdeo will not focus on racial parity. His party will not allow him to do so and his personal predilections do not tend in the direction of racial fairness. His instinctive refusal to honour the country's debt to a commercial bank on the grounds that the bank will "make a killing" is an indication of his inability to recognise the importance of fulfilling contracts as a major aspect of maintaining the institutional environment. I doubt whether he would have reacted similarly negatively if the bank was seen to have a different ethnic ownership. He can get away with his lousy racism because the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) is an institution designed for suppressing the voice of Africans in the process of unrelenting repression.
For institutions to function such as fairness will result, there must be a greater separation of powers in governance. At present, too much power is concentrated in the hands of the PPP elite, a group that is not inclined to transparency. The present efforts of the PPP are directed at more concentration of power in PPP hands by increasing control of local government organs. This will be achieved if local government elections proceed without fundamental changes in the composition of the local authorities and in the way that the local representatives are elected.
Domination of the local government organs will be added to the already compromised position of the courts which have seemingly endorsed the constitutional illegality of the Government. Redress from the courts will increasingly become dependent on how the concentrated PPP power complex decides to distribute benefits. The VAT will increasingly fall into this arbitrariness and racial bias will determine how disputes between businesses with rival VAT claims are resolved.
The donors fully understand these factors. Why are they tolerating these institutional deficiencies from the PPP? Is there a racial bias among the donors that accepts suppression of the voice of Africans? This is a difficult question to answer. Donors have their racial preferences. That is natural. Their societies function, in practice, on the basis of racial inequalities that are made tolerable by elaborate efforts to develop value systems that allow challenges to inequality and that permit adjustments, via institutions, to racial prejudice. Africans tolerate their low status in the societies of the donors. Accordingly, the donors expect Africans in Guyana to behave as they do in the donor countries on the assumption that East Indians will behave with the understanding of an enlightened ruling class. But the unrefined rural East Indians are inclined towards thuggery and bullying rather than to principled persuasion. The donors are lost in the context of these complexities and, in practice, favour the East Indians. Africans should therefore not expect too much sympathy from the donors.
In addition, the donors are fatigued. And the PPP are past masters at engendering fatigue. They listen but they remain deaf. They love reforms like the VAT that suggest that change is taking place but that harden the underlying dominant racial biases.
In this context, the system of governance has to be changed. There are complaints that the AFC has not brought about change. But no single party or single leader can bring about the needed change. If this system of governance is not changed drastically, poor Guyanese and African Guyanese, in disproportionate numbers, will be further repressed by foreigners, coming from more advanced economic and political regimes, and joining with PPP elites who are themselves driven by prejudice and who do not regard Africans as members of the same nation with prior claims to the patrimony of Guyana. We are seeing exclusion already in the cricket complex. African Guyanese are entering into a new slavery.
We have recommended systemic changes time and time again. Systemic changes require governance arrangements that empower citizens of all races at the grass roots and that facilitate inter-change between grass roots representatives and national elected representatives. At the level of national elected representatives, racial strangeholds must be relaxed to include a government of national unity.
The present PPP elite is not interested in this enlightenment. They are relying on the divisions among the Opposition leaders and the tiredness of the donors to permit even greater concentration of power in their hands.
Will the Opposition leaders and the donors permit the degradation that the present institutional break down will occasion? The VAT is not a systemic change. Like World Cup cricket, it is a distraction, cleverly interposed by President Jagdeo to take attention from the lawlessness over which he presides and the racial domination that the PPP is unrelentingly pursuing. Will we all permit the new slavery, the new Maafa? Or will we beat the drums for racial parity?
Posted
December 13th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
Messrs Jerome Khan and Aubrey Norton should have extended their analysis of the reasons for the failure of the PNCR at the polls to the consideration of a different kind of party from the one that was handed down to them. (See SN, Oct 31st, 2006, "General leadership to blame for the PNCR failure at polls--Norton, Khan"). The task between now and the next elections is to build a political movement of small farmers, rice millers, crafts men and women, mechanics and business people, organised as co-operatives to enhance their bargaining power.This is quite feasible if the PNCR acts as a catalyst and organises finance and technical assistance for the producers. In so far as the people are organised in communities(villages and other communities), their management organisations(councils) do not have to be affiliated to one political party or another, just as the internal management of a company relates to the business of the company and not to the ideology of a political party.
The Village Councils, in the pre-1969 period, selected their leaders on the basis of the leadership capabilities of the village fathers and not on whether they were PPP or PNC. Political party rivalry in a community is destructive of the cohesion of the community. Political party rivalry should relate to national issues of capitalism or socialism, of taxation policy, of income distribution, of overall monetary policy and of the operation of the social contract that the state implicitly has with its citizens and that the citizens have with the state. A community is concerned with "promoting the prosperity of all its members." It is, in effect, one big family.
These considerations are necessary to put a halt to the salivation of politicians for holding local government elections. In respect of local government elections, Georgetown and New Amsterdam can permit party rivalry, preferably in a revival of ward constituencies in which the personal attributes of the candidates will be as important as his or her party membership. Villages and communities should eschew party rivalry. Local government elections in the rural areas should not be political party rivalries. This does not inhibit party membership. But that party membership will apply to the national issues identified above.
Brother Eusi Kwayana perceived in his writings in the early 1960s that the structure of economic relations could intensify racial tensions. In a passage that has relevance to what seems appropriate now for a PNCR movement, he suggested: "Let us promote the prosperity of the people and avoid the emergence of wealthy classes of exploiters in either group, thus wiping out conflicts on grounds of rivalry."
Taken out of the 1961 context, some will say that Kwayana wishes to destroy wealth creation. It is nothing of the sort. He is advocating participation by everyone in wealth creation and the equitable distribution of benefits to the producers. There is still scope for that vision today in Guyana and the PNCR should be active in pursuing that vision. This requires transforming the Party into a grass roots movement that is not stuck in Congress Place, awaiting large donations. In the grass roots approach, the emphasis will not be placed on the leader and on the leadership, important as they are. The emphasis has to be placed on an energised membership-energised to produce, to derive strength from the agreeable bonds of co-operative relations and to be appropriately represented in the various offices of the state.
The alternative for the PNCR is to continue to rely on capitalist relations as the majority of African Guyanese are now forced to do. Distinguished Professor Clive Thomas in the Sixth William Demas Lecture observed that: "The stress of markets is not on the social, the collective, or the group, but instead it is on the private, the individual, and the personal. This makes all markets potentially destabilising, conflictual and even contradictory in their outcomes."
What follows from the reliance on an ethic based on the individual and on the private are consequences that are disastrous for weaker members even in a racially homogeneous society.In multi-ethnic societies, the consequences are far worse for the weaker races. In his 1961 remarks to Mr. Burnham, Kwayana made the distinction. He said: "[W]e live in B.G.(British Guiana) and [not] in England or in Jamaica or in Ghana where more or less a single race is found. Our position is peculiar. This is not a land of one race."
Apologists for racial discrimination who ignore the damage on race relations from the market should note the disaster in every multi-racial situation. In the Asia Times of Nov. 23rd, 2006, Ioannis Gatsiounis notes that "The racial divide widens in Malaysia." Despite the New Economic Policy started in 1971 to help Muslim Malays (60% of the population) catch up economically with the ethnic Chinese who comprise 25% of the population, the ownership of businesses by the Malays hovers around 18% instead of the target of 30%.
The report notes that the members of the United Malaysia National Organisation (UMNO) brandished daggers and thundered "Long live the Malays." One UMNO delegate remarked that "UMNO is willing to risk lives and bathe in blood to defend the race and religion."
This development is typical in relations with market friendly minorities. It is even more over-powering with market friendly majorities as the East Indians are in Guyana.
Mr. Moses Bhagwan in his article on "Being Indian in Guyana: The challenges" points to the solution. He says: "Indians are the majority ethnic group. I am of the view that it is a fundamental obligation of a majority ethnic group in a multi-ethnic society to relieve other ethnic groups in the society of the fear of ethnic oppression and insecurity."
Mr. Bhagwan's article was never published by the press. The excuse will be that the article was not solicited. But the more damaging criticism is that the PNCR have read Mr. Bhagwan's article and have not awakened to the fact that they are living in the past. Mr. Bhagwan's solution requires that demands are made on the PPP for the re-distribution of resources to overcome the disastrous consequences of cultural differences in free markets.
Messrs. Khan and Norton are therefore deficient in their analysis in three respects. First, they seem completely blind to the attraction of broadening Party activity to a grass roots movement as suggested above. Second, they refuse to take a cue from Mr.Bhagwan and demand the redistribution of resources to correct for what Professor Thomas calls "the potentially self destructive properties of markets",which, as alluded to above, are made more horrendous by market friendly cultural groups. Third, the gentlemen refuse to admit that they seem unwilling to challenge the PPP on adjusting for the advantages that East Indians now have. In this last deficiency, the Leader is perhaps more blameworthy than the leadership.
Ref. The PNCR-1 Forward Guyana Manifesto has disappointed its major support base
Posted
August 27th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
If the AFC replaces the PNCR-1 as the main Opposition party at the General Elections, it will be the result of opportunities that have been squandered by the PNCR-1, none more so than in the presentation of the Forward Guyana Manifesto.(See Stabroek News,Aug.22nd. "Economic revival would be biggest project").The manifesto, which was written, in the main, by Mr. Winston Murray, does credit to Mr. Murray's abilities as an economist but is indicative of a moribund Party.
In the first place, the Manifesto does not represent a point of departure from the Westminster model even though the Party has endorsed a power sharing government. Stabroek News reports that "[a] top priority for the PNCR-1 Government will be the early construction of a paved highway connecting Guyana to the north central states of Brazil." For a party that believes in power sharing, a top priority ought to be the pooling of ideas for an agreement of a strategy of development for the way forward. Power sharing has to be steeped in the party's thought processes and Westminster has to be jettisoned. The first criticism of the manifesto therefore is that it is not consistent with the Party's declared preference for a new way of governing.
This criticism synchronizes with the courageous and very insightful statement by Mr. Stanley Ming that the current system of governance is not in the interest of Guyanese, given the ethnic make-up of the country. It is felicitous that Mr. Ming has echoed our thoughts on the need for a super majority in Parliament to prevent Parliament's continuing to be a rubber stamp. That the PNCR had this fundamental debate in the Party and did not make public the need for the appropriate constitutional change is an indication of a party that has become tired.
Mr. Ming has declined to join another party because none of the parties has advanced ideas that address the ethnic make-up of the country. Mr. Ravi Dev once advanced ideas that promoted development based on the distinctiveness of the races. However, the rat race for office, in an environment of rabid but covert racism, has seemingly browbeaten Mr. Dev into the sloppy sentimental solutions for racial harmony that are not specific but thrive on the mere declaration of the rejection of the divisive politics of the last 50 years. Even if we did not have the racially divisive politics of the last 50 years, the fact is that the races in Guyana have differences that date back to thousands of years. We are not going to eliminate those differences by just wishing them away. We have to develop programmes that will recognise racial differences and, at the same time, encourage the enthusiasm of young people to ignore racial differences.
The literature on race relations indicates that there are differences in racial attributes that make some races better disposed to do business than others. The Chinese in East Asia, the Jews in Europe and in America, the East Indians in Africa, the Biafrans in Nigeria, the Europeans in North and South America, the East Indians in Guyana and in the West Indies, have built in cultural advantages for doing business that are not removed by whispering sweet nothings about racial harmony. Dr.Jagan had correctly observed that Africans are at the bottom of the social and economic ladder and they will remain there if specific attention is not given to their condition.
The PNCR Manifesto recognises the need for a consultation protocol for the indigenous people but refuses to give similar thought to the needs of Africans who are next to being indigenous, both culturally and economically. Poor East Indians are also in need of targeted programmes. In fact, there is need for specific programmes to address the needs of Africans and East Indians in the rural areas and in the hinterland where the superior technologies and language facility of the garimpeiros are enslaving Guyanese all over again. Dr.David Hinds has identified the need for special arrangements for the parenting and schooling of African children of pavement vendors and of single African mothers who work as security guards. These children will not move forward with the rest of Guyana because their circumstances are so depressing. In a recent conversation, I discovered that the administration by the Region in respect of the children in my village of Queenstown is working, not forward but backward, to the disadvantage of African children.
The PNCR seems oblivious to the needs of its constituents. The PNCR-1 approach expects these special needs will be solved by the execution of their envisaged investment programmes.In1972 ,when we drew up a Development Programme for Guyana, we thought in those terms but the current literature on racial harmony indicates that that 1972 approach is inappropriate in situations where there has been a great shift to market oriented development and where market attributes vary in the cultures of the various races.
The PNCR-1 has had the most exposure to these ideas. Mr. Ming obviously thought along these lines. The reluctance of the Party to be progressive in absorbing modern ideas in multi-racial development is disturbing. If the Party had embraced these ideas, it would have given the PPP a run for its money because young people would have been attracted to both realism and equity in dealing with race which certainly continues to matter .The Party would then have been in a better position to compete with the less scientific approach of the AFC in dealing with multi-racial development. We have to hope that we can return after the Elections to Mr. Ming's realism in respect of governance and to greater enlightenment in dealing with the distinctiveness of the races. There is nothing in any of the manifestos that gives me confidence that Africans will rise from the bottom rungs of the social ladder. One would have thought that the PNCR-1 Manifesto would have addressed that issue, given the base of its support, but it hasn't.
Ref: These basic considerations that the political party manifestos omit
Posted
August 8th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
The people of Guyana would have benefitted considerably more in the coming weeks from discussing how to revise Guyana's authoritarian constitution than from deciding which elites should hold office. Mikhail Bakunin had famously said in relation to the communist revolution. "Take the most radical revolutionary, place him on the throne of all Russia and give him the dictatorial power, and before a year is passed, he will become worse than the czar himself."
Our constitution is the most authoritarian in CARICOM. Our head of state is also head of Government. The PPP, in opposition, railed against the authoritarianism of the constitution. When they gained office in 1992, however, Dr. Jagan expressed the view that the problem is not the constitution, but the politicians in charge of the constitution. Despite his implied assurance of greater compassion, within weeks, Dr. Jagan and his band had become Bakunin elites.
Since then the authoritarianism has increased, culminating in a disorganised and personally driven tyranny of narcotics investors, narcotics money launderers and narcotics murderers. The degeneration has gotten to the point where extra judicial murders have become a major mechanism for crime control. Reflecting acceptance of this societal psychosis, one senior politician has condemned the rendition that spirited away a major player of this evil dispensation. Instead of breathing a sigh of relief, the President seems unhappy over the possible removal of illegal and destructive support elements.
These support elements operate above the law and rule by fear. They have distorted the thinking of the majority of decision makers into the mind sets of criminals. Young girls are being destroyed by crazy young men infected by the mental disease of a criminal environment. Illegally recorded audio and video tapes have become a mechanism to intimidate law officers. Death and mental degradation stalk the land.
Given this dreadful picture, how could any serious political party present a manifesto as if Guyana is a well ordered society? It is irresponsible therefore to avoid the issue of comprehensive constitution reform in any manifesto-not just power sharing, but local government reform, public sector reform and parliamentary reform.
The second major consideration is that it is equally criminal to pretend that Guyana is not a racially polarised society. It is also a crime, therefore, to present a manifesto as if a band of Bakunin elites, suddenly empowered by large amounts of investment resources, will remove the racial divisions that legitimised the excessive authoritarianism in the first place. Will a few cents suddenly remove five decades of racial animosity?
We have lost our way to such an extent that, in relation to race, we need to return to first principles. Alexander von Humboldt's stress on the full harmonious development of the human potential in its richest diversity is one place where we could start. All human beings-not just the elites, not just one race-have a right to develop inwardly so that they can enquire and create. The social context in which harmony and the richest diversity can be best realised is often the racial group to which we are bonded, if the racial groups are not driven to destroy one another as they have been doing for the last 50 years.
It is the potential for both good and destruction in racially organised groupings in multi-racial societies that causes the confusion in social thought that leads well meaning politicians to aim at shutting down racial groupings. They see the destructive aspect and want to bring it to an end. They do not realise that they can often bring the destructive aspect to an end by constructive efforts that will achieve von Humboldt's richest social diversity. The following example illustrates.
A community of East Indians-let us call it Community A-decided to pool their resources to drain their community, maintain their roads and dispose of their garbage. They were disappointed with the resolve of Community B, largely Africans, to which they were constitutionally joined in a Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC). Community A achieved their objective of better drainage, better roads and efficient garbage disposal on their own.
What should be the racial solution in that NDC? Should Community A be forced to sit and plan with Community B? The answer is, "No." Community B most now do what Community A did. Plan among themselves, strengthen their social bonds (Community A has a built in advantage in respect of social bonds), pool their resources (Community A has more money), drain their area, repair their roads and dispose of their garbage. Community B may need some Government help because their income levels are lower. This assistance can be provided in a principled manner at the time of Budget allocation-not in the harum-scarum haphazard manner that the President proceeds with as he goes around the country like an out of season Father Christmas.
When Community A and Community B have achieved parity in drainage and garbage disposal, they can get together, from a situation of mutual respect, to plan for education, reduction of AIDS, support to families for the reduction of suicides and the development of industries. That will more than likely result in a sustainable racial harmony, one born out of mutual respect and not from the sloppy, sickly sentimental racial harmony that predominates in Party manifestos.
At a more national level, the PPP, in particular, but the other parties as well, can take note of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's advocacy of caste-based quotas for India's underprivileged in the private sector, as reported in the Asia Times of April 29th, 2006. ("The die is caste for corporate India" by Sudha Ramachandran). Mr. Manmohan Singh was facing the revision of the quota levels for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and, in particular, for the Dalits (or Untouchables). It is a solution that is similar to that which Amy Chua comes close to recommending in her book, "World on Fire." It is a solution that Lee Kuan Yew adopted in the development of Singapore which was described in his book. "From the Third World to the First."
Racial harmony in Guyana will require explicit emphasis on community development as described above in respect of Community A and Community B and specific quotas in both public and private sector employment and contracts where the races regard the quotas as entitlements and not as gratuities.
The community approach and the racial quota approach represent bottom-up and top-down approaches that manifestos should, in a third set of considerations, emphasize. In effect, bottom-up and top-down interaction constitutes the basis for the sustaining of democracy. It is the third pillar of societal change that manifestos omit. Communities and individuals have the responsibility to improve themselves. The state has the responsibility to provide the resources and the space for development.
An example of bottom-up and top-down interaction is to be seen in the potential for an enlightened Budgetary process. The PPP has killed such interaction. They have ignored the submissions of the trade unions, the private sector societies and the wider civil society for Budget considerations. The final decisions in respect of the Budget have been arrived at in secret. The political parties should undertake, in their manifestos, to expose the budgetary process to the fullest transparency.
Examples of the secrecy approach abound. The feasibility study of the Skeldon sugar project and the Berbice River Bridge are not available for public scrutiny. The agreements that the Government has reached with the international financial institutions (IFIs) are not published in full on the web sites of the IFIs. The Brazilians are taking over the hinterland and the citizens of Guyana are losing that hold of their patrimony because of this absence of full bottom-up and top-down interaction and the transparency with which this interaction should take place.
It is impossible to elaborate on these three manifesto deficiencies-(a) constitutional reform, (b) enlightened approaches to racial harmony and (c) transparency in top-down and bottom-up interaction-in a single letter. When this thinking is applied to the platitudes in respect of manifesto presentations of social programmes and the heavenly vistas of soon to be realised investment programmes, it is clear that our Bakunin elites are, for the most part, empty headed. The vacuousness at the top of the political slates is a phenomenon that we, Guyanese, will have to address after the elections. This lot should not be allowed to continue to rule.
Ref. Mr. Corbin is under no obligation to apologise to Bishop Edghill for his house slave remark
Posted
July 18th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
It is bordering on the ridiculous to criticise Mr. Corbin for referring to Bishop Edghill as a house slave.(KN, July 15th. "Corbin's reference to Bishop Edghill as 'PPP house slave' racist'-Robert Persaud") The term, house slave, refers to the obsequiousness of Africans who take the side of the slave master against the slaves. Mr. Corbin's reference corresponds to the perception of many Africans who see the Bishop as taking the side of the Government, against that of Africans. In those circumstances, Mr. Corbin has every right to use the phrase.
The Bishop rushed to assess Dr. Gibson's writings for the possibility of an inflammatory effect but has steadfastly refused to comment on Mr. Sherwood Lowe's appraisal of how ethnic relations organisations should function in situations such as we have in Guyana. When ACDA requested the Ethnic Relations Commission to assess the employment and promotion practices of the public sector for their bias against Africans, the ERC never even dignified ACDA with an acknowledgment. When Mr. Roger Moore made a presentation on my behalf at the time of the Kean Gibson book enquiry, he was denied the opportunity to comment. He was allowed to read my statement and was reduced to being a dummy thereafter and to say nothing more. The Bishop has shown nothing but contempt for African concerns and that is the perception that is widely accepted in the African community.
When Mr. Harry Belafonte perceived that African officials in the American administration behaved in an obsequious manner, he similarly referred to them as house slaves. Mr. Belafonte is not racist. His wife is white.
Mr. Ravi Dev raises the issue of Mr. Corbin's concerns of the interests of African Guyanese and of Mr. Corbin's assessment of the Bishop in that context. Again Mr. Corbin is perfectly correct in doing so. As a leader of a national party, he will ,of necessity, be compelled to assess the Bishop in the context of African concerns just as he will, of necessity, be forced to assess the Bishop in the context of East Indian concerns, Amerindian concerns and the concerns of the Mixed Races. Mr. Dev, as a national leader has to rise to a similar level. The Bishop has to have a multi-racial compendium of concerns.
Whether any of those concerns has priority depends on how important they are in bringing all races to the situation where opportunities are equal. In such a formulation, the Bishop and the ERC have a prior obligation to fairness. That a thinker of Mr. Dev's enlightenment fails to see priorities in this multi-racial framework shows how undeveloped we are in thinking through the problems of development in our multi-racial society.
Neither Bishop Edghill nor Mr. Corbin can forget that he is African just as Mr. Dev never forgets that he is East Indian. Neither Bishop Edghill's constitutional office nor Mr. Corbin's political office denies either individual his racial identity.
The constitutional requirement, to which Mr. Dev alludes, necessitates putting the development programmes of the various races on the table and allocating resources in such a way that equality of opportunity is achieved. Of course, that is difficult. But until such comprehensiveness is conceptualised, the concerns of the various races will be addressed only partially and unfairly. The Bishop should be demanding this comprehensive approach from the Government and from all the political parties. That he has failed to do so and has not required higher standards from the Government leaves Mr. Corbin with no other option than to castigate his apparent preference for government bias .
In this situation, apologies are indeed required from all political leaders who are too lazy to think through the requirements of developing fairness in a multi-racial society. In this respect, Mr. Corbin is to be blamed but the Government, Mr. Dev and Bishop Edghill are equally blameworthy. As a start, Mr. Robert Persaud should concentrate his request for an apology on those nearest to him.
Ref: Failure to forge a national consensus has reduced us to the lowest possible level of animal behaviour--elimination of one another
Posted
May 26th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
In his response to the comments made on his observations of the Dr. David Hinds article on the PPP's failure to grasp the opportunity to forge a national consensus in 1993 (SN, May 23rd), Dr. Randy Persaud remains silent on whether Dr. Hinds was correct in his assessment. By inference, Hinds's methodological transgressions, as perceived by Persaud, imply that Hinds is incorrect but Persaud does not commit himself. And, in terms of what we are now experiencing, it is good hat he doesn't.
There is a confrontational bias built into Dr. Persaud's approach that seems incapable of grasping differential (and not always confrontational) achievements of racial groups under colonial rule. Persaud is transposing those differential developments in the latter half of the 19th century into neo-colonial and neo-conservative analytical constructs. The transposition is inappropriate. The respective developments proceeded under real time colonial rule as Dr. Persaud acknowledges in his reference, among others, to Damon. There was nothing "neo" about the colonial regime. And neo-conservatism is a modern day appellation applicable to the rejection of the modern capitalist / supposedly welfare state that emerged from the failure of capitalism in the depression years and the Keynesian recovery after the Second World War. Why try to dazzle us with inappropriate analytical concepts?
My contention about market domination with which the East Indians emerged from the 19th century was based, not so much on the acquisition of retail enterprises by East Indians, as in their agricultural activities on the land. That development is described more fully in Carl Greenidge's "Empowering a Peasantry in a Caribbean Context: The Case of Land Settlement Schemes in Guyana, 1865-1985."
Refinements of the socio-economic impacts of the various developments under the plantocracy await further research. Dr. Hinds and Dr. Kimani Nehusi stress the cultural deprivation that Africans suffered for a half of a millennium which any ruling elite must factor into its development of the country. That the PNC failed to do so in its long period in office, and as the PNCR continues to do in its current period in Opposition, is the result of imbibing too fully the colonial education that stigmatised African culture as primitive.
The significance of this cultural deprivation is missed by Dr. Persaud who laments the time and resources wasted by East Indian men at rum shops. What is important in this observation is the East Indian family context in which this rum drinking takes place as compared with the single motherhood in the African working class where the father is often not even around to be rebuked about his drinking. These African family instabilities had their origin in the 19th century when African villages were made unstable and African earning opportunities were disperse.
Africans developed, despite everything, an ability to perform in administration-the unrecorded memories of which can be crucial for the efficient functioning of various institutions. What many African administrators, (in the Civil Service, in the Police, in the Judiciary and in the Army) who have been shunted aside, have forgotten, the new entrants have not yet learnt.
The essential point of this debate is that the failure to grasp the importance of basing development on the respective strengths of the multi-racial people has resulted in a progressive deterioration of standards that has now landed us with the phenomenon of a racially divided morality. If an indiscretion is committed by an African, East Indians deplore it but Africans applaud. If it is the other way around, Africans deplore and East Indians applaud.
Martin Carter predicted this before 1955 and warned both Dr. Jagan and Mr. Burnham of this degenerative consequence. Brother Eusi Kwayana made an effort in 1961 to overcome the degeneracy. Refusal to recognise that a single political party cannot govern the country has reduced the country to the ridiculous state in which a drug lord claims righteousness in his crimes. Much the same 'moralising' proceeds in the African camp. We have been reduced to a lower level of behaviour than mammalian beasts. At least, mammalian beasts settle after the herd establishes who is boss. It is only with respect of animals of a different kind that elimination is the objective. Boa constrictors, presumably less intelligent and more individualistic, will eliminate alligators and vice versa. That is where we are as a consequence of reliance on coercion rather than accommodation as a basis for governance.
Even if hegemony was the objective in 1993, the techniques for achieving consent were absent. But more than hegemony is required. Self determination by the respective groups in the context of development resources is the answer. Dr. Persaud should direct his energies to the design of co-operative development and not to hegemony. His references in that design should begin with our own 'anthropologists'-Eusi Kwayana, David Granger, David Hinds, Kimani Nehusi, Rupert Roopnarine, Frederick Kissoon, Ravi Dev, Andaiye, Tacuma Ogunseye, Christopher Ram and Grantley Waldron.
Please come home, Dr. Persaud and work intellectually from the bottom up. There is a lot to be learnt that Gramsci and Stuart Hall (although Jamaican) can't even begin to understand. When Stuart Hall went to Oxford, the concern was over which group he will join. It turned out that the groups joined Stuart Hall. That was great for a West Indian. But that does not qualify him to pronounce on the very peculiar developments in Guyana.
Ref: Dr. Randy Persaud seems to be guilty of "[creating] knowledge with the intent of legitimising current political interests"
Posted
May 12th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
Dr. Randy Persaud, in his refutation of Dr. David Hinds's contention that the PPP missed an opportunity to forge a national consensus in 1993, is indeed "welcome to the debating school on Guyanese politics," to use Mr. Frederick Kissoon's words. Unfortunately he has allowed academicism to cloud his thinking and to prevent him from making a contribution to bridging the 50 year old racial divide that has made Guyana corrupt and backward. Guyana's backwardness is unimaginable. A registered letter posted to me from Georgetown on April 25th has not yet arrived on May 11th. One posted to me from Belize was at my house in 5 days. That is a measure of our backwardness.
Forging a consensus in this backwardness requires an understanding of what causes the racial divide and the genius to think of strategies to bridge the divide. In Dr. Persaud's second letter on "African suffering and Guyanese politics in the age of negotiate or we will shoot," he shows some understanding of the problem when he notes that East Indians and Africans were both at the receiving end of economic exploitation by the planters and the state machinery. But then, in contradiction to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whom he quotes approvingly, he is silent in respect of differences in the ways that the two races were exploited.
Mr. Frederick Kissoon who, in another article, alludes to Adamson's analysis in "Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904," which highlights the following crucial distinction.
The planters had expected the enslaved to remain on the sugar estates and to work for wages instead of just for upkeep. When the ex-enslaved decided to leave the plantations and used their savings to buy struggling plantations at exorbitant prices as Eusi Kwayana and Tchaiko Kwayana tellingly describe in "Scars of Bondage," the planters decided to drown the villagers periodically. They exercised their influence in the state to tax the former enslaved Africans to pay, in part, for bringing in indentured workers, primarily East Indians, to replace the labour that was withdrawn. They saw to it that the Afrikans were denied loans for any business operations.
The exploitation of the indentured East Indians was different. Wages were low, hardly enough to survive and living conditions were horrible, as Dr. Persaud describes, noting the logie in which he was born. But, in typical divide-and-rule fashion, many indentured East Indians were given land near the sugar estates in contrast to the wholesale robbery of Afrikans who purchased their villages at inflated prices.
The planters by then, had recognised the brutality with which they treated Afrikan families and made amends by encouraging East Indian families to develop in accord with their culture. The East Indians have to be given credit for their frugality, their hard work, their willingness to delay gratification and to accumulate wealth.
Afrikans, in the meanwhile, were scattered into balata bleeding, timber grants and gold mining and dispersed in ways that often destroyed stability in family relationships. Many were forced to seek a livelihood in Georgetown, the place that Dr. Persaud observes produces no commodities. In fact, Georgetown "produces" commerce and governance.
While it is true, therefore, that East Indians never enslaved Afrikans, it is important to note those differences in planter exploitation. Amy Chua in "World on Fire," refers to "path dependence" which can "play a tremendous, unavoidable role in group economic success. Access to capital is so important to economic success… that already prosperous ethnic groups have an enormous market advantage."
Perhaps "enormous" overstates the market advantage that East Indians developed in Guyana because there was considerable differentiation in the way that the planters, in their usual divide and rule tactics, distributed benefits to the East Indians. But, by the beginning of the 20th century, market advantage there certainly was.
Afrikans correspondingly developed what is now considered an unsung advantage in working in administration, particularly government administration. During the period when, as Dr. Persaud notes, Afrikans controlled state power, if anything, that bias towards administration was emphasized at the expense of developing attributes appropriate for market advantage." When President Hoyte, with the help of the IMF, switched the economy in the late 1980s to greater marketisation, the advantage of acquired administrative skills was diminished. What mattered most was the market advantage that the East Indians had acquired from the latter half of the 19th century. The supposedly "communist" Dr. Jagan strengthened those advantages during his years in office during 1957 to 1964. Any socialism that Dr. Jagan strengthened was in the realm of rhetoric.
An opportunity to combine the respective strengths of market advantage enjoyed by the East Indians and administrative skills held by Afrikans existed in 1993. Recognition of that economic strategy would have required a corresponding political forging of consensus as Dr. Hinds and the WPA envisaged.
There would have been nothing unalterable about the respective advantages of the racial groups. East Indians would have acquired administrative skills while Afrikans would have ventured more into the market as they had begun to do during the period of shortages. It was, and still is, a noble vision. The WPA had surrendered a regional seat to the PPP to fulfill that vision. That Dr. Persaud would fall for the petty and mean description of Mr. Hoyte as an "Electoral Bandit" and the WPA as a "2% Party" indicates that he places little importance on ideas when they come from Guyanese and does not recognise the need for that genius in the life of a nation to spot opportunities and to take advantage of them.
Dr. Jagan and the PPP did not have that genius. The PPP still does not have that genius as their present careering into Elections, for which we are not prepared, indicates. Dr. Jagan was battered by disappointments and inconsistencies and thought of the future in the context of re-creating the past. But one expects his bright young cohorts to have the imaginativeness to spot that opportunities were missed. In that respect, Dr. Persaud has failed, caught in Trouillot's "silences."
I have not seen Dr. Hinds's article in Social and Economic Studies but 1993 was followed by a switch of East Indians into the top decision making positions for which they had little experience. A calamitous deterioration in government services followed. The squeezing of Afrikans out of the top positions in Government because of distrust without corresponding openings for Afrikans in commerce and business, led to unnecessary bitterness and to the deepening of the racial divide. The fact that an Afrikan who is a member of the PNCR cannot be trusted to work in a senior position in the Government, other than if s/he is a toady, indicates that the consensus for which Dr. Hinds and the WPA yearned, is far from being forged. These are not issues that can be addressed without examining alternative concepts of democracy. Is our governance system presidential or parliamentarian? Is our democratisation bottom-up or top-down? These issues have not been faced up to seriously not even when the constitution was being revised in 1999. In the meantime, we have become a narcotics economy that has thrown up drug lords who are claiming that they are respectable citizens. Ideas coming from a party with a 2% vote can sometimes be worth a lot more than those that originate from a Party with a 50% vote where the thinking is defunct, if I may borrow a phrase from the great economist, Keynes.
Dr. Persaud should avoid majoritarian positions when they are defunct.
A BLACK AGENDA FOR GUYANA & THE USA!
Posted
April 25th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
1. Introduction
Designing a Black agenda for Guyana & -The USA is exceedingly difficult for several reasons. First, the past 5000 years have witnessed the entrenchment of patriarchal power relations that contradict the more egalitarian, democratic and peaceful relationships of ancient Afrikan societies that existed before patriarchy. There were other ancient societies with similar features but our focus ought to be given to the Afrikan societies with spiritual leaders that often were women. The second reason for our difficulty is that slavery did severe damage to Afrikan family systems and information on the state of the Afrikan family in Guyana is virtually non existent.
The third reason is the co-existence of Afrikans with East Indians who hold the positions of dominance in the society but who combine that dominance with patriarchal relations. Although ancient East Indian societies were also mother-centred, the relations today in the East Indian society in Guyana are even more patriarchal than they are in many parts of the Western world. This makes the task of shifting the whole society away from hard line patriarchal relations difficult. But the shift is necessary if our society is to have peace.
2. Advantages of a shift to mother-centred societies
There are two sets of reasons why we should shift the orientation in the total society. The first is personal. The second is societal.
In respect of the personal benefits, C.C. Jung pointed out decades ago that life becomes more exciting as men recognise and free the often suppressed (i.e. the feminine) part of themselves. The counterpart development in women also applies. As Willis Harman and John Horman point out in their book on "Creative Work," recognition of male and female attributes in us does not mean that differences between the genders disappear. In other words, no one is advocating that we aim at becoming homosexuals and lesbians. What it does mean is that the process of discovering our full selves becomes more exciting.
The societal benefit leads to peace. "The feminine way [views] leadership as facilitation and nurturing, rather than [as] control or dirrection.....Women's influence is perceptible in current tendencies to break away from patterns of domination by experts and authorities, to move toward co-operation [rather than to] competition, to break down the rigid divisions between management and labour, to challenge the notion in science that reductionism is the way to understand things, to oppose militarism, to resist manipulative technologies." (ibid: 71)
These personal and societal benefits are obviously human but they apply to Afrikans because of the immense challenges that Afrikans face everywhere. In respect of both the person and the society, the woman has a special place in the influence of her child. That child has been with the mother for 9 months before being born, and no influence is as powerful as the mother's. She does not have to command, she merely has to suggest. As men, we can never achieve that special place of the mother, we can only support it. For that reason, some religions like the Bahai say that when we educate a boy we educate a person but when we educate a girl, we educate a family.
In a situation quoted by a psychologist, a child was separated from her mother until she reached adulthood. A reunion was then arranged. The mother was among several other women but woman and child recognised each other and bonded immediately.
The mother-centred approach in leadership is facilitating and nurturing (See quote above) and crucial for our Black leaders to avoid artificial barriers between leaders and followers and to encourage imaginativeness in the thinking of the leaders.
An example ,outside of Black leadership, that highlights the comparison between co-operation and control (some would say 'freakish' control) is the President's response to the Gajraj affair. The Opposition group is asking for co-operation. The President is giving direction. The co-operation approach is mother-centred. The President's approach is patriarchal. We don't have to ask which approach is better.
If we follow through on mother-centredness, we will show a preference for (a) decentralisation of power from higher to lower levels, (b) resurgence of localism, (c) de-bureaucratisation (d) worker self-management and (e) focus on self-help.
3. How mother-centred is Black society in Guyana & (The USA)?
Perhaps the most cruel consequence of slavery was the damage done to the Afrikan family. We lament the loss of language, the loss of belief systems, the loss of culture but nothing, to my mind, is as cruel as taking us away from our families.
Afrikan family systems functioned in relation to lineages. Those in the mother's line had their own functions as was the case for those in the father's line. With slavery, those links disappeared. In slavery, procreation was encouraged for the commercial reason of producing more slaves.
The upbringing of children was subject to haphazard arrangements. In addition to those arrangements was the abuse of women to satisfy the sexual pleasures of white overlords. More devastating to Afrikan families under slavery was the need of the white overlords to accord a place of importance for the bastard children of those relationships. It was therefore necessary to accord a place of high respect for bastardisation, thereby totally distorting what bourgeois society now calls family values with a societal preference for the fair skin complexion of mulattoes.Afrikan family values and the dark skin were demeaned.
We therefore have a mix in our families of what Professor Raymond Smith calls matri-focal families, of single mothers in very high numbers, of two parent families, of bachelors and of spinsters.Many of these spinsters are high achievers and, like the young men, cannot find jobs.They accordingly become fair game for a kind of covert prostitution that the wealthier East Indian men seem anxious to exploit.
The tragedy is that we do not know the proportions of these relationships and a major research agenda should be undertaken to find out the facts. For we will never hold our own in this society if our women cannot perform as the Bahais expect them to do in nurturing our families. This should be a major item of research for our conference on the Black society.
These factors notwithstanding, Black women have been influential in both patriarchal and mother-centred directions in Guyana. Many have given, and continue to give, outstanding leadership in Afrikan cultural organisations, in political parties and in the trade union movement. It is considered progressive to increase the representation of women in the hierarchies of these organisations. But that numbers game in relation to gender balance misses the point of shifting the organisations to become more influence driven than power driven.
That families are deficient in the influence that they exert is evident in the present dilemma that now has become a huge part of the Black agenda and, that is, to get mother-centredness in the thinking of the death squads and the Black leaders of death squads. Our women, with the support of our men, need to make the point to the murderers and would be murderers that they have copied the ways of the West but have abandoned the essence of the Afrikan spirit.
The approach based on influence rests on understanding the thinking of those who have to be influenced. A major weakness in those of those of us who wish to see social change is our unwillingness to understand how people think. We make recommendations without the slightest idea of the thought processes of those whose ways we seek to change. Black leaders should be aware of the many sub-cultures with which they must deal. And those sub-cultures are many.
Nothing in the Black agenda is more important than getting to the bottom of the thought processes that have made it possible for patriarchal leaders to recruit Black people to kill Black people, to drive wedges in our society, to set traps of greed, avarice, envy, gluttony, luxury and pride and to preach individualism at the expense of the community.
Dr. Nehusi will deal with this issue of the factors that affect our solidarity. It is clear that this is our major agenda item. Reducing the patriarchal relations in the rest of the country
In Guyana, we can use the concepts patriarchal and authoritarian interchangeably. While it is not on our agenda to address the issues in the East Indian community, it is our concern that the patriarchal relations in the East Indian community can have a negative effect on us in the Black community. To the extent that mother-centred approaches can reduce harshness of relations in the East Indian community, they can also benefit relations with Black people.
The issues in the cross-cultural relations are complex. They bear features of the weaknesses in Black society and the aggressiveness of patriarchal relations in East Indian society to take advantage of those weaknesses. Recent examples have strengthened that aggressiveness. The employment policies of the ruling class have steadily increased domination by East Indians in the public services. The salaries of those positions held primarily by Afrikans are held low to discourage entry by qualified Black people and to encourage the departure of those employed. The strategy for this domination objective is based on severely under-taxing the country. The rationale for the under-taxation is the avoidance of the transfer of incomes from hard working sugar workers and rice farmers to lazy civil servants.
In the entrepreneurial area, East Indian network arrangements squeeze out Black entrants. This is particularly evident in fishing where Black entrepreneurs complain of difficulty in getting access to the use of infrastructure. In rice farming, enterprising Black rice farmers have been forced to sell their rice farms because machine owners have left their fields un-harvested. In the villages, rice cultivation is introduced in farm land areas designated for other crops. Water inlets into fish and shrimp ponds are allowed to flood farm lands of Black farmers.
More important, is the destruction of the incentive systems by the pervading narcotics culture. As long as the facilitation of drug trans-shipment continues, money laundering will be a main source of profit. It is therefore necessary for anyone doing business to be closely allied with the drug barons. These barons have become banks and financiers in the money exchange, import and export markets and they induce the profit motive away from cost control and revenue enhancement to hiring mules to transport drugs and purchasing commodities at very low prices to facilitate the laundering process. The Black agenda to compete in this environment is one of survival in a corrupt world.
These developments have moved the society to even more patriarchy.In the classical mafia world, the term of the "god father" was applied. The god father is the ultimate in patriarchy. The push to stay "pon tap" should be seen, therefore, not only in racial terms but in the greater reliance on power and force in the society. As those who are ruling emphasize force, those who are being ruled will do the same.When the force of the "god father" is allied with the force of the police, mother-centredness appears futile unless it can be combined with an appeal to like-minded organizations in CARICOM and in the wider world overseas.
4. Conclusion
When this article was drafted a year ago, the emphasis was placed on the role that the PNC should play in the Black agenda. The model used then was the PPP. Subsequent analysis and god father type behaviour in the PPP has led to a rejection of the authoritarian model in the PPP. The appropriate model for the Black agenda is that provided by ancient Afrika which is based on mother-centredness and on peace.
Unfortunately the families of Afrika were devastated when they were transported across the Atlantic to be enslaved. The most urgent agenda task is to restore the role of women in our families and to employ the mother-centred approach with support from males to assail that mentality that has been exploited to commit Black on Black murder and that has succumbed to the rampant taking of bribes. The research work to understand our families needs to be done but initiatives can be taken even before the research is undertaken. All of this will lead to a rejection of the urge to compete with the PPP on the terms set by the PPP. That institution is authoritarian and needs to be changed into a more mother-centred institution. The watch word is co-operation to achieve egalitarianism, democracy and peace. ------------------------------------------------
Mr. Corbin, Mr. Felix and Mr. Williams should take NTN to court.
Posted
March 28th. 2006
By Clarence Ellis
The
Editor
Stabroek News
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Editor,
With respect to the illegal tape which was aired on NTN television station, Mr. Corbin should bring a criminal charge against NTN. The power of a private citizen to bring a criminal charge exists as Mr. Kwayana proved when he brought a criminal charge against Mr. Steve Merai for the murder of Shaka Blair. Clearly criminal charges by citizens cannot be brought indiscriminately but a charge by the Leader of the Opposition in this matter is not frivolous since we can be certain that this is a trial run tape and that several others will follow. Guyana is still a country of laws and illegalities such as this one must be stopped. The remedy is in the hands of Mr. Corbin.
That wire tapping is illegal, there can be no doubt. Mr. Corbin would have the difficulty of proving that NTN did the taping but NTN can be assumed to be guilty if it does not identify the source. NTN must know that the tape is illegal and should have turned it over to the Police as soon as it heard the contents. If NTN is forced to answer criminal charges, and if the responsibility of NTN for the illegality can be made to stick with NTN, then NTN will be more circumspect in the future in breaking the law.
Mr. Justin de Freitas in his letter " Were these private matters or issues of public concern? (SN ,March 23rd.) implies that Mr. Felix is not entitled to confidential conversations about public matters. I have never heard such nonsense. Is Mr. Felix not entitled to think of public issues and to share those thoughts with a friend? Mr. Felix is not entitled to make those views public, but to tell him how to think of public issues and with whom to discuss those thoughts is the height of tyranny. Are we living in a civilised world or are we living in a PPP ideological prison? Is this George Orwell's "1984"?
This brings us to Mr. Mohabir Anil Nandlall's disingenuous reference to the New Zealand case of Hosking et al. Runting et al. 2004. The decision of the High Court relates to a photograph taken in a public place. Is Mr. Nandlall implying that the High Court would have made the same decision if the photographs were taken in the parents' bedroom? Is Mr. Nandlall suggesting that a private telephone conversation between two individuals is in public space and therefore is not private? Can Mr. Nandlall define what is private space in relation to the telecommunications world?
Mr. Felix and Mr. Williams should define the telecommunications space that they occupied when they conversed as private space and should sue NTN for an amount in excess of G$200 million for the invasion of their privacy. The content of the conversation is irrelevant. You are not permitted to peep into a bedroom and take photographs of a husband and wife engaging in sexual intercourse and publish those photogaphs. Mr. Nandlall is justifying the ushering in of Nazi type repression in respect of private behaviour . If Mr. Corbin can get a conviction against NTN and Mr. Felix and Mr. Williams can collect some easy money from these pimps, the episode will have its good side in restoring the rule of law, not Nandlall's law, but Guyana law.
Ref. Depoliticisation of the public services would require systemic change
Dr.N. K. Gopaul , in SN's report captioned " Gopaul says appointment aims at professional development" (SN, March 24th.), stated with some pride that "those who lobbied for the depoliticising of the public service should be very happy that a man who has been appointed based on consultations between Hoyte and Jagdeo to head the public service is now heading the Presidential Secretariat." When we recommend the depoliticising of the public service, we are talking about systemic change that will remove the very appointment mechanism that Dr. Gopaul praises. Our proposals envisage an appointment process which comes under the oversight of Parliament and that is independent of the President. We see the break up of the Public Service Ministry into 4 personnel departments, each attached to the 4 public service commissions. The personnel departments will then have an opportunity to specialise in human resource development for the respective specialisms of the public service to which they are attached.
We also associate depoliticisation of the Civil Service with decentralisation which will permit an efficient interchange of civil servants between those at the centre in Georgetown and those in the regions. Civil service capability developed in Georgetown will then be available for Lethem or Barama to deal with the immense problems of border control, natural resource management and adequate tax and royalty collection. In similar fashion , officers in the regions will be available for Georgetown where they can bring to bear their immense knowledge of the regions.
Regional Chairmen, in charge of executive functions, would inhibit this interchange of officers that is necessary to bring all parts of the country to equal standards of efficiency in administration. Regional Chairmen and Regional Councillors should function as catalysts to the development process in their areas . Personnel departments associated with developing skills for these complexities in public administration should preferably not be mixed with those for the police , the judiciary and the teaching profession.
This is only a brief comment on a very important systemic change that the country requires. It is a great pity that the head of the public service ( who is now the acting head of the Presidential Secretariat ) does not envisage the potential for improvement in governance from depoliticisation of the public service. There are other statements in Dr. Gopaul's remarks that indicate that the leadership of the public servants is in bad hands. Our public service heads need to be trained if we are to develop.