Commentary
guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com
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 Com