Guyana has been recolonised by foreign capital

Feb 23, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Guyanese will today be engaged in bacchanal on the streets of Georgetown as part of Mash Day activities. Lost in the revelry will be the political significance of the day, which marks the fortieth anniversary of Guyana becoming a Republic, a political miscalculation by the Forbes Burnham administration.
The declaration of Guyana becoming a Co-operative Republic had domestic political and economic implications. It marked the swift and sudden movement of the country towards the creation of a socialist State, even though the steps to deepen this process were consolidated more towards the middle of the decade.
At the political level, the decision to declare Guyana a Republic was premature because no sooner had we done so than both Venezuela and Suriname tried to take advantage of the situation by pressing home their claims. Given that threat, the then government ought to have delayed declaring Guyana a Republic so as to capitalise on the protection that the British could have offered in these disputes.
Guyana soon found itself as a nation now cementing relations with the rest of the world, having to deflect from the aggression of two of its neighbours, a situation which was not helped by the fact that we could no longer rely, as the Falklands did a decade later, on British military power to come to our rescue.
What was in our favour was that despite the internal political divisions in the country at the time, the government could count on the support of the then opposition when it came to defending the country against these aggressive postures.
The economic implications of Guyana becoming a Republic were to follow much later, but the changes that emerged in the late seventies can be said to have been hastened by what was perceived to be the lessons learnt from political developments in Trinidad and Tobago.
The growth that was recorded in the economy after independence did not translate into the pockets of the masses.
This was assessed as having to do with the fact that the main pillars of the economy still resided in foreign hands which devoted production towards capital flight rather than to domestic development.
Political independence had not been followed by a dismantling of centre-periphery economic relations, which had persisted and which did not allow for sufficient resources to flow to the people of Guyana. Thus arose the decision to place under State control the commanding heights of the economy.
Guyana was ill-prepared for the monumental task of managing these sectors and it was therefore not surprising that under State-control, both industries soon went into remission despite the favourable prices paid for both commodities in the early years of the seventies.
Guyana therefore can be said to have squandered the goodwill that was created by our bold declaration as a Republic. Incompetence, mismanagement and the ill will created by electoral politics which were characterized by fraud and deceit, acted as a brake on development, both at the political and economic level.
Guyana ended up paying a high price for its political and economic adventurism. By the late seventies, the economy was in dire straits, a situation made worse by political and economic incompetence.
Guyana went through a protracted period of stagnation. It was eventually forced to make sweeping economic reforms and adopt a neoliberal model of development which saw the state-centric economy disintegrate.
After more than twenty years, this very model is now open to question.
While it has brought improvements to the average citizen, it has its limitations and the frustrations that are now being felt in Guyana have a great deal to do with the shortcomings with this model of development.
Thus, Guyana on the beginning of its fifth decade as a Republic needs a serious soul–searching, one that should address not just the shortcomings of the political model of governance, but more fundamentally whether the neo-liberal model, which has allowed Guyana to be recolonized by powerful capital, should not be dumped.
Forty years after Guyana became a Republic, its people are still waiting. Guyana went backwards for a long time and recovery from that process was never going to be easy. But it is equally true to say that Guyana is taking too long in its forward march.
There are those who feel that the answer to the problem is in an improved system of governance.
There are others who, however, hold that at the heart of our problems has been the model of development which has been pursed, which when examined in the context of forty years as a Republic, must make this country an enigma.

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