After a decade of promises and the recent Cabinet outreach in Linden nothing has materialised

Sep 19, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
On Mr. Jagdeo’s first visit to Linden in his capacity as President, he told the Region 10 communities that Ituni/Kwakwani/Linden will be the industrial corridor of Guyana and reiterated Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s promise of an industrial site in Linden.
After a decade of promises and the recent Cabinet outreach in Linden where he promised that the Board for the Linden Economic Fund would have been established within a month to facilitate the processing of business loans, nothing has materialised. What we see instead is stark poverty, communities brought to their knees and proficient artisans relegated to being the occasional garbage collectors and drain diggers.
Though it comes as no surprise that the Government of Guyana has now leased the Everton Bauxite Plant to Fidelity Investments Inc, it adds further confirmation to the mounting case of the Government policies to economically discriminate against the African community, an act that I call economic genocide which is consistent with the United Nations Convention which defines Genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” For some this term is harsh but to me it is what I see before my eyes, a slow deliberate torturous effort to decimate the African economy, and bring Africans to their knees.
After the Government presided over the divestment of the bauxite industry all the efforts made by bauxite workers and African business investors to acquire the LINMINE and BERMINE operations were rejected.
Now the nation learns that the sugar workers through the Sugar Industry’s Pension Fund, called the Sugar Trading Enterprise Pension Scheme (STEPS), lost an average of 24 percent of their fund on the international market, the result of their investment in the U.S. company, Merrill Lynch. We also learn that sugar workers were allowed to invest their pension funds in CLICO, CARICOM countries and elsewhere.
No one condemned these investments for sugar workers, the condemnation lies in the disparity in treatment of Bauxite workers by the Government since this was a consideration not granted to Bauxite workers even though several requests were made and proposals submitted that were intended to help workers receive a pension on retirement.
Note is also taken that when the said sugar workers pension scheme was in financial trouble the Government instructed GuySuCo to bail out the pension fund by injecting a reported $1.1 billion.
While governments usually make financial investments to bail out businesses such a requirement was not even necessary for the bauxite pension plan which was worth in excess of $2.5 billion.
All it needed was the approval of Government, as owner of the industry, to facilitate the establishment of an investment fund from which members of the bauxite pension plan could have borrowed at preferential rates for personal investments and this would have contributed to sustaining the pension plan. This was 1) rejected and 2) no alternative effort made by Government to maintain the Pension Fund.
Bauxite workers and bauxite profits built this nation, paid government officials and funded developmental projects of this economy, now no appropriate  job creating alternative are there for them and their communities, neither is there a pension for the retired who have contributed to the pension fund.
As the President and his team walk around the African communities they are asking people to forget the past even as they use their yearly trek to Babu John and PPP strongholds to spread propaganda against Africans, seeking to divide and alienate the races.
They want Africans to forget the past when their past actions impact daily on Africans’ lives and by extension the entire society; actions that were deliberately imposed by the Government to bring communities down, increased the nation’s poverty level and threaten longevity. How can it be forgotten what were, and continue to be, done to Buxton, Linden, other African dominated communities and this society? How can the nation forgive a President and a Government which have not forgiven a people for being born in the skin they are in, their political choices and associations?
Since Government is constitutionally bound to manage in the interest of all, President Jagdeo must be held accountable for what he does to the people and their resources. Entering communities they have decimated, like Godfathers, doling out taxpayers’ money like personal gifts, in their attempts to make people mendicants, parading their condescension before the media spotlights, as they seek to strip people of their dignity even as they cajoled them to feel grateful, is totally unacceptable. The nation read that the President donated computers and steel pans to Buxton, instead of the State issued computers and steel pans.
These things were bought from taxpayers’ money, not the President’s personal money; therefore the recipients are entitled, as any other, without having to feel that the Government is being benevolent. In fact, as taxpayers, they are the ones paying for the things they receive, funding the Government and paying the salaries of President Jagdeo, his ministers and advisers.
Lest we forget, President Jagdeo and his team are servants of the people, not their masters. They grant no one any favour and bound to serve the interests of all and all are entitled to equal share of the nation’s resources and opportunities for development. Africans, as a marginalised group, targeted for destruction by this government, need to stand up, like all oppressed people in other parts of the world and agitate for what is rightfully theirs not succumb on bended knees.
Lincoln Lewis

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