Flying people

Apr 13, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Each Easter Monday, my topic was the migration of the Guyanese people. I would write on the flying kites and the flying owners who would soar out of Guyana after they laid up their kites. I guess I have used up that particular discussion. However exhausted that subject is, it will not go away because people just keep leaving. When the CSME finally came up for ratification, I remember saying to myself that Barbados will get into nasty problems with Guyana. It is now happening.
I got a telephone call last week from a television station asking me for a comment on Mrs. Jagan. The speaker gave his name as Visham Ramsaywack. He asked me if I remembered him from GTV (renamed NCN). I vaguely did and told him so. He explained that he has settled in Trinidad with his wife through certification with the CSME. There are hundreds more like Ramsaywack that are taking the opportunity to make use of free entry into sister Caricom territories through the CSME that has done away with country requirement of work permit. Barbados has been hard hit with a Guyanese deluge.
That influx seems to have irritated PM Thompson. Thompson’s response is that “we are too small.” He is right but the CSME exists and either Barbados or Guyana will have to do something to prevent a vexation in the long-standing friendship between the two Caricom neighbours. The problem appears insurmountable though. And the truth is that the problem lies on this side of the border. Barbados is one of the world’s most stable societies. Lots of rich and famous people have houses there. A placid island without crime and political instabilities, it is also one of Planet Earth’s most inhabited territories.
Rickey Singh praises the post 1992 Guyana Government. That Government is about to chalk up seventeen consecutive years in power, but Mr. Singh, who is approaching his eighties, shows no sign of wanting to retire in Guyana. Sir Shirdath Ramphal did retire from the international scene and settled in Barbados. Guyana’s Honorary Consul in Barbados just wrote a long letter on me in which he endorsed the special democracy Cuba offers its people, but Faria, despite his fanatical support for the Cuban and Guyana Governments, is moving house from Bridgetown. It is rumoured that Dr. Aubrey Armstrong may return to Guyana take up the leader slot of the PNC but he has been in Barbados for so long that the average Guyanese has never heard about him.
Barbados is bursting at the seam. Add to that a neighbour where no one wants to stay and you have a recipe for a big, big quarrel. The Guyanese of course are not innocent bystanders. Given the large numbers of them in the West Indian islands, they have acquired demographic importance, which translates into electoral value. This is the situation in Antigua, Trinidad and Barbados. When he was Prime Minister of Barbados Mr. Owen Arthur spoke favourably of the Guyanese presence on the island. He drew electoral support from those Guyanese who could have voted. The election result was a shocker. Arthur, who did nothing to make him lose, did lose. Thompson doesn’t seem enamoured of the Guyanese. Two months ago, he met with immigration officials to outline his policy on the subject. He takes the position that the economy cannot cater for an influx of workers. Thompson is careful not to mention Guyana, but the media and political observers in Barbados know that he has Guyana in mind. And you will have to be stupid if you live in Barbados and do not know that it is Guyana he is referring to; the presence of the Guyana entry into the island is hardly invisible.
Trouble is ahead for both Caricom partners in ways that are quite different that will eventually generate animosity. Any economist will tell you that the global crisis will not end in 2009 or 2010. Guyana will be harder hit than Barbados. Guyana is in trouble already, big, big trouble. The Treasury will have to find more than seven billion dollars because of the CLICO tsunami. That will dent the economy. A fall in sugar earnings and a steep drop in remissions from the US will wreak havoc in this country. The traveling Guyanese will hurry faster to “Little England.” The island will be having its own fallout from the global crisis and will be harsher in its refusal of Guyanese. So those kite flyers that you see on the seawall in their thousands today may well turn up in the island of flying fish and coo-coo as the exodus of Guyanese from the land of their birth continues unabated.

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