A THIRD WHAT?

Nov 24, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Even if the Constitution of Guyana could be successfully amended to facilitate a third term for President Bharrat Jagdeo, why would anyone wish to do so? Even if it could, why should it?

This year marked the tenth anniversary since President Bharrat Jagdeo assumed the Presidency. He had done so with a tremendous amount of goodwill and with great expectations that he would make a big difference in the lives of the working poor of this country.

After ten years, the record sheet would show that he did make a difference but not in the lives of the working poor. He made a huge difference in the lives of the rich and famous, some of whom are now threatening to buy out the whole country.

The rich are getting richer and more and more contractors are joining the ranks of the upper and middle classes. But for the poor, they have to continue to struggle to put food on their tables. Seventeen years after the so-called working class party, the PPP, came to power, workers are still waiting (they are no longer fighting) for a living wage. Seventeen years after their party swept the polls, sugar workers had to proceed on strike after being insulted with a three per cent wage offer, when the teachers have sealed up a five year agreement which guarantees them a five per cent increase each year plus duty free benefits for select categories and numbers of teachers.

The excuse is always that these wage demands cannot be sustained by the economy. But is it the workers of this country who are responsible for the miserable economic performance over the past ten years which has seen GDP growth average a miserly 1.758 per cent.

When one considers that over the past three years, economic growth has been 5. 127 per cent; 5. 397 per cent and 3.035 per cent, then a clearer picture emerged of the sort of difficulties the economy went through in the height of the Jagdeo presidency.

In short, Guyana has underperformed under the Jagdeo presidency.

At the heart of this under performance has been the failure to attract direct foreign investment. The government supports a model of development which places emphasis on foreign private capital. It even established an agency to help facilitate investment. In the seventeen years of the PPP administration, there has not been a single large investment to match that which was achieved under Hoyte.

Not one. And this is an admission of failure because the very model of economic development which is being pursued places a high premium of foreign direct investment.

Even the promised five-star hotel for Kingston has fallen off the radar. We may have hydro but it will have to be part-funded by the Chinese and the IDB. So even for a project of that scale, foreign investment is hard to come by.

And yet the ruling party takes umbrage when the Alliance for Change indicates that security has hurt investments in Guyana. It has, and this is the verdict of study done by the IMF which tried to analyze why after years of heady growth, things stagnated for a long, long time.

The greatest failing of the Jagdeo presidency is, however, not the economy but in the arena of national security. We have had the infamy of three massacres in one year, not to mention the fact that gunmen operating out of a small village virtually held an entire country under siege, a country that had an army and police force on which some seven billion dollars was being spent each year.

Look how many innocent citizens were slaughtered by the gunmen operating out of Buxton. Look at what the crime wave did to this country. Count how many persons abandoned this country, never to return and then you will get a picture of what failed leadership is all about.

And yet those big businessmen want to ask the people of this country for a third term for the leader under whom all these terrible things, including the slaughter of children in their beds, took place. The government could not even protect its own Ministers because one of them was cold –bloodedly executed in his own home along with some of his siblings.

But the tragedy was not just restricted to physical security. Floods in 2005 wiped out two-thirds of the country’s GDP. Then we had the financial crumbling of CLICO which has left hundreds of Guyanese worried about their investments and the uncertain fate of over four billion dollars of funds invested by the country’s National Insurance Scheme.

So tell me, in the face of all of this, why would anyone be proposing a third term or referendum to decide on whether there should be a third term for President Jagdeo? Are those persons who are putting forward such a proposal not primarily acting in their own interests?