Independence Path

May 26, 2009 Editorial

Today, our nation is forty-three years old. As nations go, we are a mere stripling when one thinks of the several millennia that, say, China and India have endured as coherent entities.
But young as we are, it does not, and indeed, should not prevent our citizens from wanting to live the “good life”. After all, some would ask, “What does age have to do with it?” as they point out that most of the models of the “good life” are so much less ancient than the two cited behemoths that have only recently begun to progress.

So the question arises as to what exactly has prevented us from fulfilling the dreams we entertained when we finally became independent from Britain? Britain, we were told, had systematically exploited us for over a hundred and fifty years – not to mention the Dutch for the previous two hundred years. Once they had departed, and we were left to enjoy our own riches, happy days would be here to stay. One fly in the ointment, we should now concede, was the context in which the British departed.
The “best and brightest” US administration of John F. Kennedy decided – over the protestations of the British – that Cheddi Jagan was a communist “fellow traveller” who would create another Cuba in the western hemisphere.

Determined not to be tagged “soft on communism” in domestic politics after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy bought British support for a CIA -sponsored operation to oust Jagan. The violence that the CIA destabilisation programme inspired against the PPP government took an inevitable racial orientation because of the nature of our domestic politics.
While there had been historical competition between the several groups introduced into our country to labour on the sugar plantations that had on occasion broken out into violence, the CIA-inspired violence was different.

It was different because it introduced violence as a political tool to capture the state and altered the political dynamics of our country with deleterious effects that has persisted into the present.
Up to the time of the CIA’s intervention, Mr Burnham’s PNC had accepted granting of Independence to Guyana under the PPP that had been victorious at the 1961 elections.
It is very likely that for that introduction of violence and its rendering of our society, our politics and our development could have progressed more along the lines of Trinidad and Tobago that has a similar population-mix as ours. We may not have had oil but we certainly had other resources and the educated manpower to develop them.

We are positing that the bitterness engendered by racial violence in the sixties reverberated in the political violence of the last decade and has served to prevent us from fulfilling the promises of Independence. This is not to say that other impediments such as “neo-colonial” relations, “underdevelopment”, and strategic policies of the government or developmental models have not played their part. In matters of human development, whether at the individual or group level, causality is never singular. What we are asserting is that our persistent societal divisions have conspired to prevent us from even giving ourselves a chance to confront those other obstacles – and becoming really Independent.

While as a nation we may be young, individuals who were adults at the time of Independence are a fast disappearing breed. It is a great human tragedy that most of them have passed on without fulfilling the dreams they had in 1966. It would be an even greater tragedy, however, if we allow another generation to grow old and wither unfulfilled on the vine.

The most recent humiliations of our citizens in Barbados, to be hunted like dogs as they sought the “good life” in that foreign land, should inspire us to get our act together.
This means moving beyond the violent divisions of our society, fostered by outsiders, and acting together to build our “good society”, right here. Happy Independence to all Guyanese.