Mr. de Groot should have been more meticulous in his condemnation

Sep 23, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
If Mr. David de Groot (“Letter was ‘totally subjective:” SN: 20/09/10) were to be held to the same standard he demanded of me, his contribution would not have seen the light of day and, I dare say, your ‘opinion’ column would be seriously depleted. Furthermore, given his request for objectivity, I would have thought that he would have specifically identified and provided evidence of his concerns.
Instead, he succumbed to that pervasive infantile subterfuge of arguing by way of innuendo, which must be the mother of all “subjectivity”!
After all what are we to make of: “this leads one to question the agenda being pursued” without any argument or a shred of evidence, when that agenda has often times been published in these columns and was stated in the correspondence under consideration as follows.
“It is now widely accepted that Guyana’s development is being stymied by disunity as a result of the ethnic division in our society…Others and I have argued that what stands in our way is this disunity, rooted as it is in ethnic insecurity and that it could only be sufficiently mitigated by way of constitutional reform that allows all groups to participate equitably in the management of our country…Given the present political configuration, this will require a national partnership of all opposition forces, and more specifically the support of the indigenous people, who should use this opportunity to institutionalise policies to end their marginalisation in the politics, management and the allocative arrangements of the country.” (“The Amerindians need to begin a transition from ‘being a people in themselves to being one for themselves:’ “ SN: 18/09/10)
The statement that Mr. de Groot described as “dangerously controversial,” totally subjective and devoid of any analytical input” is the following: “If the PPP/C with the support of the indigenous people is able to win the next elections, the status quo will remain and this will do nothing to remove Amerindian marginalisation nor ease African-Guyanese alienation and the present conflictual/debilitating conditions will continue and perhaps be even worse.”
As stated previously, it would have been helpful if Mr. de Groot had indicated what in the above statement he found “dangerously controversial” and why.
In the absence of this however, the following is provided as a possible framework for the elaboration of Mr. de Groot’s concerns.
Firstly, when I said that “If the PPP/C with the support of the indigenous people is able to win the next elections, the status quo will remain…” I meant that the power relations in our society would not change in any fundamental way; that in power terms, the PPP and its government (the PPP/C) would continue to rule much as they do today.
I can see nothing even mildly controversial about such a construction. Secondly, what is Mr. de Groot’s problem with my claim that if the above power relations remain they “will do nothing to neither remove Amerindian marginalisation nor ease Afro-Guyanese alienation”? Is Mr. de Groot saying that the indigenous people are not marginalised in the present power arrangements and/or that Afro-Guyanese are not alienated from the present national system of governance?
Thirdly, I claimed that if the power relations in our society do not change “the present conflictual/debilitating conditions will continue and perhaps be even worse.” Is Mr. de Groot claiming that the current power relations do not lead to debilitation and underdevelopment? Finally, was he concerned with my assessment that should these conditions fester, the situation “perhaps” will become worse?
All of the above are simply my assumptions of Mr. de Groot’s concerns, which I do not intend to address in the absence of elaboration from him.
I would have thought that given the not too dissimilar historical trajectories that brought each of us to our present political positioning and his stated penchant for objectivity, Mr. de Groot would have been more meticulous in his condemnation.
Henry B. Jeffrey

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Mr. de Groot should have been more meticulous in his condemnation

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