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The interest of our citizens comes first

Jul 26, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I read with utter amazement in the Kaieteur News of Sunday 20th July 2008, an article captioned: “Twenty Million dollar Amerindian Village handed over.” Immediately, “The world is watching”, the overused CARIFESTA advertisement, sprung to my mind.

The intention of the government, I am sure, is to tell the world that, in the Indigenous communities in particular, and in Guyana in general, “all things are bright and beautiful”.

Is the government suggesting to the world that the homes in the average Amerindian village could be valued in the vicinity of twenty million dollars?

Or is this a case of money for the PPP boys? Let us assume it is not. Let us assume that that is the value of an Amerindian village of the said size.

Can an Amerindian village with the support of the government be constituted as a Cooperative Society and apply for and secure financing from the local commercial banking system using as security their collective property to the tune of twenty million dollars?

The painful truth is that the home of the average hinterland based Indigenous citizen is essentially framed of wattle and roofed with ‘troolie’ or some other type of palm leaf and the floor is simply dirt.

In the riverain communities, the floor is made of wattle, stripped ‘manicole’ bark or rough lumber and is generally, a few feet above the high water level.

Where there are walls, these are of stripped ‘manicole’ bark or rough sawn lumber, depending on where the home is located.

This is pointed out not in a derogatory way but to bring to the fore the truth as to how the homes of our indigenous people are made.

While CARIFESTA is something that we the citizens of CARICOM should all hold in high esteem and be proud of, we should never place fun and frolic above and beyond the sacred national responsibility of ensuring that our citizens have access to certain basic necessities of life.

The watching world, I am certain, will prefer to see the Jagdeo Administration putting the interest and wellbeing of the citizens of Guyana first.

We brag of being on course to attaining the Millennium Development Goals. These MDGs include, among others, the elimination of poverty by 2015.

I would argue that spending twenty million dollars on the construction of a model Amerindian village, while affording employment for a few of my indigenous brothers and sisters and possibly huge kickbacks for some officials, does absolutely nothing for the indigenous communities in general.

It is merely an Orwellian propaganda manoeuvre to give the world a certain image of the Jagdeo Administration.

It, in fact, follows recent utterances by the Hon. Carolyn Rodrigues, then Minister of Amerindian Affairs in the National Assembly in the course of a debate.

The Minister said that if poverty were a key contributor to high levels of crime, then the ethnic group in Guyana which would have the largest number of criminals would be the Amerindian group.

The world should see the Hon. Minister offering an unconditional apology to Indigenous peoples everywhere.

I ask my fellow citizens thus: “Could not the sum of twenty million dollars of the Guyanese tax payers’ money be better spent to improve the quality of the lives of the Indigenous peoples of our country?”

Mr. Editor, is it morally right to offer to the world the government’s calculated, intended image and to pretend that the Indigenous Peoples of Guyana live in a rose garden setting when in fact the truth is quite the reverse?

I hold firmly to the view that the Government ought to relook at its priorities. Should this be done, the government will realise that, as a nation, it would be better to address the question of the improvement of the quality of the lives of our Indigenous citizens in particular and the Guyanese people in general rather than hosting CARIFESTA at this time. I feel strongly that the interest of our citizens comes first.
Mervyn Williams

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