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Guyana 18 years after October 5, 1992

Oct 11, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
No one, not even the most pessimistic of persons would have believed that the people in Guyana, 18 years after kicking the authoritarian PNC regime out of office through victory at the ballot box on October 5, 1992, continue to find themselves locked in a struggle for democratic renewal. The PPP which replaced the PNC in 1992 had promised much in terms of democratic renewal and improvement in the people’s lives. In actual fact they have delivered very little real benefits and there is mounting grief among Guyanese.
Whenever an objective critique of the PPP’s stewardship is undertaken what will emerge among  its primary features are (1) the deluge of corrupt practices, (2) nepotism and cronyism, (3) the implementation of policies of racial discrimination and (4) the implicit and explicit Indianisation of the State, (5) torture, (6) rape of the country’s resources, (7) the protection it gives to foreign employers while disregarding its legal obligations to protect Guyanese workers against their exploitative practices, (8) the imposition of draconian measures against the people, (9) the rejection of an acceptable industrial relations process, (10) the trampling of citizens’ fundamental rights, including the rights of workers to belong to a union, (11) the assaults on press freedom and (12) the regular violations of the Rule of Law.
During 2003 WPA’s Professor Clive Thomas writing on “The State as a Vehicle for Criminal Enterprise”, in reference to corruption and violence in the society said, “There are several “dialectical” counterparts to the “pathological descent” of the Guyana state into increasing violence. One is the rapid transformation of the state from an engine to provide economic and social development, the guarantor of the rule of law, the preserver of political stability and the protector of national sovereignty, into a criminal enterprise. That is, the state has become little more than a vehicle for blatant individual self-enrichment, unconscionable plundering of our resources with the “blessings” of the state, and grabber of the wealth produced by the broad masses of ordinary working and self employed persons. This transformation has produced in Guyana the classic situation of a “state for itself”. This state impedes economic growth, stifles the productivity of all productive factors, scares away “legitimate investors”, and encourages hustle and other corrupt and bandit forms of capital into the country. In other words, the state serves the interest of backward capitalism, which describes the economy today. This backward capitalist environment spawns the violence and terror around us”.
In the subsequent period to now everything that has taken place confirms Professor Thomas’ arguments.
WPA believes that the crimes committed by the PPP party and government against citizens of Guyana are of the worst imaginable. WPA continues to hold fast to its position that one of the factors which support the arguments of the “pathological degeneration” of the ruling party and government is the litany of state sponsored terror it unleashed on the people of this country through its alliance with the drug lord, Roger Khan and his band of assassins.
We believe that these blatant acts against the people reveal grave warnings of what would happen if the PPP keeps its hold on power at the next elections.
As we in the WPA look back on the 18 years of the PPP’s stewardship we do so not with any sense of great achievement but with grave trepidation. The fragmented political opposition does not hold out much hope for the people. WPA is aware that the present Constitutional arrangements put total power in the hands of the party with the single largest amount of votes at the elections regardless of how large its vote is proportionately and whether it even constitutes a majority of the electorate; let alone a qualified majority of the electorate.. With elections in Guyana constitutionally due in 2011 a struggle has to be waged to change this situation to allow for executive power sharing before the elections.
Desmond Trotman
Working People’s Alliance

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