Will Guyana’s truly independent thinkers please take a firm stand on the political stage

Jan 20, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
With President Bharrat Jagdeo off to the Middle East again to woo investors or get economic help for Guyana, especially now that his LCDS has taken a huge financial hit, one has to wonder why the President never tried doing the same in the United States, Canada, or Europe, where hundreds of thousands of Guyanese are so heavily vested financially they are literally contributing more to the Guyana economy on a yearly basis than many other sources of Guyana’s income.
In fact, the Private Sector Commission (PSC), supposedly a reservoir of brilliant ideas on how to accelerate the engine of economic recovery and development, should have been in the forefront with teams of business persons staging and mounting major investment expositions or trade fairs in Guyana and abroad.
With overseas Guyanese remitting over half a billion dollars a year to the Guyana economy, there is tremendous potential here for both government and the private sector to tap into for many developmental projects that could redound to the benefit if Guyanese at home and those in the Diaspora. Sell Guyana as an investment haven, but use business people, not politicians, as sales representatives. What has the President’s foreign trips yielded so far?
I am not saying that the President should be laid back and leave everything to the private sector, but if he can help create an environment that is conducive for the private sector to come into its own with competing ideas for developing Guyana, it likely could yield greater benefits as opposed to having the private sector being laid back while the President continues to take the lead role in this Herculean job of reviving the economy.
Look at how hard he worked for his LCDS concept to become the impetus for a major economic take off, only to watch it go from sizzle to fizzle in Copenhagen. Should he be allowed to continue doing this alone?
Again, the private sector is better suited for courting foreign investors. It really pains me, however, to observe the lethargic state of the private sector; it has withdrawn to the point of either acquiescing to the wishes and dictates of the government or merely echoing government’s sentiments.
There is no real sense of independence and potency in this body. Why has the PSC allowed itself to become dormant to the extent government has seized the reins of the economy that is being pulled by a donkey instead of soaring on twin turbo-charged jet engines?
With two years left in office, it may be too late for the President to switch roles with the private sector on the economy, and so I can only hope the next government will give this sector the kind of support it needs to come into its true potential as the bridge to increased foreign investments and the engine for recovery and development.
If only we had the right kind of visionaries in both the government and the private sector, rather than this situation in which the President is doing a major portion of the private sector’s job while the leader of the private sector seems settled for making statements supportive of the government, and winds up being named in a controversy over the sale of a plum piece of state-owned real estate in Georgetown.
I am stressing the importance of the private sector because it is in this sector that we are supposed to find the sharpest minds with the brightest ideas for making Guyana’s economy competitively better.
This archaic notion that the economy’s future is dependent exclusively on the government has to be done away with.
It didn’t work under the PNC for 28 years and it hasn’t worked under the PPP for the last 17 years. We just never seemed to have had the right visionaries, starting with Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, and now President Jagdeo.
But harsh circumstances today dictate Guyana’s economy cannot continue to be held hostage to the whims and fancies of governments with agendas that suit their ideology but not the people’s reality.
We need a plethora of ideas, outside the confines and control of partisan politics, for bettering our country. Our nation needs a cadre of independent thinkers as opposed to the ongoing partisan group-think process. Is it possible we have independent thinkers but they are being scared by the government into staying quiet while the nation beckons for more thinkers who can  become doers?
By independent thinkers I do not simply refer to people who hold different views from government, but people who are brave enough to publicly express those views and then follow through on making those views result in some kind of positive reaction or response from government. The combined parliamentary opposition is supposed to be the most potent group to this end, but with the government’s majority control of Parliament – the highest decision making body – it passes laws that do not require two-thirds majority votes and, as a result, the parliamentary opposition is rendered virtually ineffective in stopping government. Or at least so it seems. So, like the engineless private sector that is being towed by the government, the parliamentary opposition may prove less challenging a forum for revolutionary thinkers to gain the kind of traction they need to advance their thoughts and ideas.
The only group the government does not yet have in check, but is working feverishly to do so by constantly attacking and denigrating it, is the independent media in Guyana. Many independent thinkers have found a powerful voice in the independent media to vent their opposition to and criticisms of government, but there has to come a time and point where those voices have to be ratcheted up a notch as the government seeks doggedly to undermine and eventually shut down the independent media.
The media should not only be a means for criticising, but also a means for helping form or create groups at home and in the Diaspora – taking full advantage of the Internet where possible – to generate competing ideas for making Guyana better. As steel sharpens steel, so should people with like minds help sharpen each other’s thinking and allow ideas to become crystallized for possible adoption and implementation.
The reason why communist countries don’t like the private media is because they tend to offer too many independent ideas that can contradict the dominant idea the government wants implanted in people’s minds. The private media can also expose the wrongs the government does and this could turn the people against the government.
But in a fledgling democracy like Guyana, where we experienced a virtual blackout of the private media under the Burnham regime, we cannot afford to slip back to that era. We need a strong and independent media that will serve, among other things, as a sounding board for Guyanese on everyday issues, including the ones government wants us to ignore.
That is why we have to take careful note and respond forcefully to the President’s dubbing of the independent media as the new political opposition, or when he described Kaieteur News as a rag, or when his government withdrew ads from SN. All those remarks and actions were calculated efforts to undermine the private media with a view to silencing or eventually shutting them down so he can operate his government carte blanche, with no checks and balances from the political opposition or the Fourth Estate. For government to gain virtual control of the private media the way it has over Parliament and the lame private sector is to hand it important keys to our future.
I know there are many who have defended this government against charges it tends to operate like typical communist regimes do, but the evidence of a dictatorship emerging, pretty much akin to what obtains in communist-run countries, is unmistakable. Look, this government doesn’t have to be full-blown communist before we can recognise where it is heading, and since one of the definite signs of a dictatorship is to control independent thinking or silence independent voices, then it is clear where the PPP is taking Guyana. Burnham said he was taking us socialist and he did certain things eerily similar to what we are seeing today, but he never told us what it would be like until we ended up in a quagmire!
Do we know where the PPP is taking Guyana? What the PNC regime almost got away with, the PPP regime is hell bent on trying to succeed at, but aren’t there enough independent thinkers in Guyana capable of stopping the PPP before it leads Guyana on a road march to political lockdown?
When a cabinet minister can take to the airwaves to castigate the Guyana Red Cross (GRC) for deciding to do its own fundraising for the Haitians caught in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake, this minister did not misspeak; she actually bared the thinking of the government when she tried to submerge the GRC’s efforts under control of the government.
This ought to be a useful reminder to all and sundry that this government is determined to exert control over everything and everyone.
But the question of the moment is: why are so many who ought to be representing myriad independent views in a democracy so silent or even subservient?
The near unanimous support for the LCDS, even though most stakeholders and supporters don’t know what the final draft contains, also exposes the disquieting gullibility of so many that they would allow an unreliable government to sucker them into appearing as though their opinions count, but in the end they don’t even know if their opinions really count.
Why aren’t stakeholders asking the President for copies of the final draft of LCDS? Does it really contain their views? Are stakeholders satisfied the President kept or fulfilled all the promises he made at past stakeholders’ meetings?
Guyanese need to know that whoever controls their thinking controls them, and after 17 years in power, it is clear that the PPP is more interested in holding on to power to control everything so people can become fully dependent on it.
It has no desire to empower people so they can grow into independent thinkers and help control the destiny of Guyana. 2011 is going to be a make or break year for the country; Guyanese at home either make the decision of the decade to end this foolishness of having a government always think for them or become broken under the rigid mind control games coming their way courtesy of the PPP and its minions.
Emile Mervin

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