Deadly trap, permanent prison

Jul 24, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I hardly get time to look at television. The internet may kill television for those who follow world events. You miss something that the newscast carries and you can still get it on video on the internet.
In Guyana, the situation is different. Many of the local programmes are not repeated. I seldom see those talk-shows. I read a long letter by Tacuma Ogunseye on his interpretation of the politics of the PPP as adumbrated by Donald Ramotar during a discussion with Winston Murray on television.
According to Ogunseye, Ramotar was emphatic and clear in his pronouncements on racial discrimination – his government does not institute race-based policies and his party, the PPP, does not practise racial discrimination. If this is what local talk-shows are all about, I am glad that I continue to miss them.
The PNC has never admitted to racially driven programmes. The PPP will continue to echo the same falsehood. Should listeners switch their sets to see and listen to this exercise in excruciating boredom? Of interest to me is Ogunseye’s letter (“PPP/C governance has contributed to racial insecurity- KN, July 16)
Nowhere in his long letter (it is almost a page), did Ogunseye look at the hopeless racial prison that the two major parties have been born into. Devoting his space to an evaluation of the PPP Government, Ogunseye’s portrait takes in an account of the seismic racial shift in the public sector under the PPP.
One wonders why the PNC, ACDA and Rickford Burke have not as yet documented this wholesale makeover of the public sector and presented it to the American Black Caucus. Anyone who has lived in Guyana the past ten years either has to be a fool, a moron or completely devoid of any moral redemption not to see the racial engineering that has taken place and is currently going on in the entire public sphere that the PPP Government has control of.
It is my contention that one has to be a rich beneficiary of the PPP policies to deny that the PPP is not populating the public realm with East Indian employees.
This is as visible to the eyes as the ubiquitous, perennial grass. Ogunseye describes the race bias in contracts, employment, etc. He failed to mention house lots and scholarships.
In the area of house lots, the statistics are depressing and add to the fears of those who believe that sooner than later if the PPP does not pull back, disaster will show its face.
From 1993 to 2008, house lots from state lands went like this (R is for region): R one -111; R two-3,471; R three- 19, 141; R four -27, 709; R five-2,213; R six -8,490; R seven-956; R eight -57; R nine- 232; R ten- 6,403; squatter settlements -7,673.
These figures do not include lands given freely and at tiny cost to sugar workers throughout Guyana.
Now do a demographic analysis of each region and you will see which group has benefited the most from house lot distribution.
In Regions Three, Five and Six where PPP constituencies predominate, thirty thousand plots were awarded out of a total of 76, 888 nationwide.
In Region Four, the schemes identified by the PPP Government have all been located in districts where East Indians predominate – Hope Beach area, Ogle, Eccles, Diamond, Uivtlugt; Parfait-Harmony among others. In Region Four, houselots awards have been skewed in favour of a particular group.
I do not have the statistics for scholarships because the Public Service Ministry refused to release the data to the researcher employed by the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) to determine if ethnic bias exists. The ERC has remained silent on this rascality.
What Ogunseye failed to bring out in his assessment of the PPP is that both the PNC and PPP are deeply embedded in ethnic communities and they both use state power to give their respective supporters the resources of the country.
The PNC has no choice but to do that if it wins the next election by a demographic majority of African voters.
The only way to prevent an unbelievably disastrous event in Guyana is for the PPP and PNC to team up with other organizations in a national government.
Or for an Obama-like situation to arise where the election parties are not drawn exclusively from pure ethnic constituencies.
We cannot continue with this race mess.

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