A Wasted Year

Nov 30, 2012 Editorial

A year has now passed since the elections of November 28, 2011, for which the results were announced on December 1st. It has been a year wasted.
At the end of 2011, Guyana, as the second poorest country in the hemisphere, faced a gamut of challenges that begged for cooperation between the major political players to effectively confront them. Ironically, since Guyana had always been blessed with an overabundance of resources, the investments that would develop these resources and deliver economic growth simply demanded that the political climate not be roiled. As one private sector body pointed out recently, political instability is the greatest impediment to investment – especially in third world countries. No entrepreneur would deploy his hard-earned capital in a country if they are unsure as to whether it would be at risk, based on totally exogenous factors like political upheavals. In the modern globalised world, there are enough challenges due to raw competition from 200-odd countries.
All the politicians had to do was tone down their rhetoric and work together to encourage investment into the country. In this regard, the Opposition has been a major disappointment. To fund their campaigns, they cultivated impressive linkages with the Guyanese Diaspora. One would have hoped they would have encouraged those well-heeled expatriates to establish factories and other employment-generating facilities to produce a win-win situation for them and the rest of Guyana.
What we received, however, was the same, stale denigration of Guyana as ‘corruption and crime-ridden’ as the Opposition decided to prove to the government that ‘two man-rats can’t live in the same hole’. The problem, however, was that it was not just the two ‘man-rats’ that lived in the hole: the Guyanese people saw their expectations dashed as their horizons dimmed. The control of the Executive and the Legislature, by respectively the PPP and the combined Opposition (APNU and AFC), led not to dialogue and negotiations, but open hostilities spilling into the streets. In retrospect, the street-protests by the Opposition over the slow count of the votes should have signalled the populace not to get their hopes up too high. The intimidation of GECOM officials and sustained claims of voting ‘irregularities’ set the stage for the later eruptions. Opposition supporters were led to believe for months that the Statements of Polls were in some way fiddled with, only to be told by their leaders after much “back-and-forthing” that nothing was amiss. This left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of many citizens. We then proceeded to the bitter pitched battles in the National Assembly that inevitably resulted in stalemates as the government proceeded to the courts after each Opposition ‘victory’. We saw, for instance, rather than the budget being the occasion for crafting a national vision for our development and progress, it became bogged down in a war of attrition to settle old scores. The country’s development was placed on hold.
The subsequent protests in Linden were merely the continuation of the no-holds barred politics in the Assembly, transferred into more robust surroundings. The shootings and killings were quite predictable as the two sides dug in their heels. A half-year had passed and the country’s development agenda was firmly fixed in reverse gear.
Since then, the demand for the removal of Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee by the combined opposition took centre stage, where it remains to this day. The Commission of Inquiry into the Linden shootings appears to have been merely one additional device to prise him out of office. Organised with foreign Commissioners at tremendous cost to a depleted treasury, the Opposition evidently believe that the findings may not be what they expected and have consequently returned to the Assembly to take another stab at Rohee.
From motions of ‘no-confidence’ we have moved on to motions to ‘gag” and prospective examinations of whether privileges might have been violated. In all the frenetic ‘motions’ – verbal and physical – Guyana and its developmental needs seemed to have been missed. It is as if the country is an afterthought in this wasted year.

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