The people must not be ignored

Nov 16, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
As we are about to enter elections and the major political institutions have made known their vision for governing our dear land, it is over important that the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) declares its vision to the form and quality of governance required to secure a society where all are treated equally and are able to benefit from the fruits of this nation.
The GTUC sees its work as pivotal to influencing national decision-making in keeping with the creation of a just society, built on United Nations Human Rights Declarations and International Labour Organization Conventions.
For us, politics is about people and people’s development, impacting our lives from the womb to the tomb.
As a consequence none can ignore the acts or actions of politicians and allow them to make decisions in the absence of our input.
It is the long held belief of successive leaders of the GTUC and a grounding philosophy of ours that the nation’s problems and development are best addressed through broad based national involvement that respects the inclusion of the workers of this land-past, present and potential; unionized and non-unionized.
Article 13 of the Constitution clearly outlines “the principal objective of the political system of the State is to establish an inclusionary democracy by providing increasing opportunities for the participation of citizens, and their organisations in the management and decision-making processes of the State, with particular emphasis on those areas of decision-making that directly affect their well-being.”
All governments given a mandate to serve are duty bound to give true meaning to this objective, by creating an environment to enable active and meaningful participation of all.
As a society founded on diversity, discrimination, distrust and division, social weapons used by enslavers/colonizers to divide and conquer and thus maintain their status quo while denying fellow human beings what was rightly theirs, every Guyanese knows or ought to know that if violations of human rights and dignities were wrong under the colonial masters and enslavers then similar acts of indignities and divisions cannot be acceptable now.
These were strategies used in pre independence period to enrich colonizers and keep the colonized divided, impoverished, subdued and controlled. Today, even as racial divisions, apartheid and human rights violations have long been displaced and condemned in modern states, even by their former architects, these strategies of the pre colonial era continue to haunt every Guyanese.
In Guyana the governing group, now displaying representative characteristics of the planter class enrich themselves off of us, keeping us impoverished and under-developed, fighting each other over scarce resources.
They engineer efforts to divert our collective energies from the source of our problem and collectively working to fix same in a land blessed with bounty and smart people.
History is replete with stories of achievements when we, as a people, stood together. In unity we have demonstrated the strength that saw the achievements of emancipation from chattel slavery, the end to indentured-ship and colonialism, achievement of political independence and the right to self determination.
Yet having come this far, the question lingers: Why are we where we are – a society plagued with distrust, divisions, discrimination, corruption, lawlessness, oppression, wanton human rights violations and social degradations; and lack of will to unite and fight against injustices even as a few drain our life force and national wealth?
Where is the will that Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow and the workers demonstrated in their collective fight for social, economic and political justice; the will that brought Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Peter D’Aguiar and the colonized together to fight against colonial rule? Where is the will that can today bring this nation together to fight against an uncaring, inept, evil government that is only blessed with the art of mass corruption and propaganda?
Where is the will to fight against any new government formed by any political group that believes it can escape the laws of the land, violate the constitution and marginalize any section of the Guyanese society?
Citizens, the will to preserve and protect must not be compromised by which party we support or whoever forms the government.
Lincoln Lewis,
General Secretary

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