Post Colonial Guyana in a New World Order

Mar 24, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
Recent reports in the media and in other fora prompted me to return to my archive and look up a presentation entitled, “Post Colonial Guyana in a New World Order”, which I gave at the 17th Conference of the Association of Caribbean Studies (ACS) in Manaus, Brazil in 1995.
Sitting on the Guyana panel were R. Mark Kirton; Ph.D.; Jan Carew, President, ACS; O. R. Dathorne, Executive Director ACS, and Professor, University of Kentucky; and your humble servant. The theme of the conference was, “The Caribbean, the Americas and the Need for Discourse: Landscape and Imagination.” Coming out in my presentation were several recommendations which I still consider as particularly relevant in view of current interests with respect to several issues including national unity; regional integration and the environment. Permit me to paraphrase those recommendations of 1995 so that readers could advise themselves of their relevance (or otherwise) in today’s context.
The paper expressed the view that Guyana needed to revive its role with respect to the concept of non-alignment where previously the country held a very high profile; at the same time adopt a more committed approach to regional integration through the CARICOM grouping.
The country should develop its capacity to sustain acceptable levels in the standard of living of the Guyanese people with a concomitant reduction of the present heavy cost of structural adjustment measures. Further, I suggested that there should be urgent consideration to harnessing emotions as they relate to such concepts as culture, race, and ethnicity, and conversely optimally exploit those of sovereignty, nationalism, as a means to achieving progress in political, social, and economic reforms, and develop a national unity front if we are to avoid a fragmentation of the fragile national unity.
Guyana should consider the ecological cost of development and modernization in terms of erosion, pollution, and damage to the ozone layer as a consequence of investment by multinational corporations which represent economic mega blocs. It might not be fanciful for Guyana to anticipate a strong position if the country were to tie any requests by international conservationist to refrain from using virgin rainforests for development, to incentives from industrialized nations in that direction. Of course the situation would be balanced out by the prospect of global warming with an attendant danger of flooding in low-level coastlands as obtain in Guyana.
Debt for nature swaps where parts of a country’s natural resources are exchanged for parcels of debt to bring about debt forgiveness and serve as an incentive for economic discipline. Concomitantly there should be the privatization of loss-producing state entities, and a greater appreciation for locally produced commodities to realistically manage the debt crisis.
The paper concluded by locating Guyana in the post cold war era and as not unwilling to ignore the stringent conditionalities and consequences of structural adjustment. With the United States emerging as the super power there was no need to fear that the threat of destabilization would act as a catalyst for an affected under-developed state to seek refuge and assistance from a third party with interests possibly inimical to those of the U.S.
It meant then that Guyana needed to recognise the pressures aimed at bringing about changes in the ideological direction of economic practices, reduction in the size of bureaucracies, elimination of corruption, and the introduction of an open free market system. It meant also hat leaders would become harder pressed to demobilize politically those who were paying the highest costs of development, or convince the people of the appropriateness of paying those costs.
At the same time internal and external agencies supportive of particular development strategies would be encouraged to express political support, and to behave in a manner consistent with that development.
Finally, the paper argued that Guyana in a New World Order needed to adjust her foreign policy or face the threat of marginalisation globally.
The suggestion was made that there must be a new mature political will which recognises that the “winner will not take all” in a scenario of consensus politics if we are to ensure that the concept of nationalism would be so developed as to extend to a wider model of regional unity.
Patrick E. Mentore

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Post Colonial Guyana in a New World Order

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