The struggle for dominance will destroy this nation

Feb 05, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Reading  Devanand  Bhagwan’s  pieces “There are many questions pertaining to Mr. Kissoon’s research material” (KN, January 31, 2013) and “Anti-racism crusaders should think about all other ethnic groups” (KN, Feb 4, 2013), and Roger Williams’ “Kissoon is highlighting the fact of racism” (KN, February 1, 2013) and then reading of some of Kissoon’s statistics on his theory of Indianization of the public sector under the PPP, we get a very clear picture of what is wrong with Guyana.
The problem is childish, biased and suspect analysis and brazenly illogical and preposterous statements coupled with the spraying around of statistics and numbers without context and full-fledged analysis and explanation for the largely erroneous and incomplete conclusions.
Bhagwan finds faults with Freddie, and rightly so in some cases, but does not venture beyond the effects to look at the causes. I think a proper analysis of Kissoon’s research can only occur if the entire research is examined and to this end, I call upon Kaieteur News to put the research on its website in an accessible format such as a pdf file.
Beyond the ethnic composition of the public sector, the bottomline is that Guyana actually needs a smaller public sector. The public sector is highly inefficient and must be made efficient, which will naturally shrink it by about a third to a half of its current size. That shrinkage would reduce ethnic imbalance. Then you could go about balancing it when hiring new workers.
Bhagwan and others love to point out the fact that the traditional public sector remains African dominated. Indeed it is. However, there is no mention from this group of a historical and endemic refusal of Indians to join the traditional public sector. The PPP has been in power for 20 years and Indians refuse to join the police and army.
This Indian scorn of the public sector is never referenced by these commentators.
If the police force is declining and needs to recruit and only one ethnic group is willing to put up with the low pay, unsafe working conditions and negative societal stigmatization, why stand on a soapbox and behave as if the imbalance in the public sector is due to some African conspiracy to deny Indians from the public sector?
The incontrovertible fact is that Indians, who are 40% of the population, have always demonstrated a potent disinclination to joining the public service, and that undisputable fact explains in large part why there continues to remain a serious ethnic imbalance in the public sector.
The biggest reason for Indians refusing to join the public service has been economic. Indeed, some Indians were forced out of the public sector under the PNC, but the primary reason for the poor Indian participation in the public sector has been low pay followed by migration.
But the PPP has changed all of this. It has created a parallel public service comprised of primarily Indian and PPP contract workers who are better paid than the traditional African-dominated public sector. This has been the gravy train the PPP created.
We saw some of the outrageous salaries some of these individuals are collecting for doing nothing more than the little the traditional public sector worker does. This fat cat parallel public service has magnified the inefficiencies. Because they are paid more, this parallel public service takes more from the taxes of the poor and working class who hand over hefty taxes and VAT from small salaries to the PPP.
I am not opposed to ethnic balance in the public service if it occurs throughout the entire public service from the lowest level jobs to the highest positions. However, that is not what is happening under the PPP. At the top of the traditional public sector, more and more Indians are being moved into supervisory and management positions. Indians’ increased presence in the non-contract public sector in the 20 years of PPP rule has come predominantly at the higher levels of public service management.
It is not only wildly inefficient and economically disastrous for the PPP to expand the public service by creating a parallel contract worker public service (as this expands inefficiency and practices duplication and burdens taxpayers more to pay these fat cat contract workers) it is also very discriminatory. It is discriminatory because the African-dominated traditional public service is not being compensated anywhere near the pay offered to the Indian-dominated parallel contract worker public service created by the PPP, even when they do the same job. This is a discriminatory practice.
People like  Devanand Bhagwan do not understand the tragedy that is unfolding in this country. We would not have this glaring concern if the PPP did not in the past 20 years create this contract parallel public service that is paying Sultan’s salaries to people who are doing redundant work already being done in the traditional public sector.
The issue is not just the traditional public sector. It is intellectually dishonest to focus on that sector alone. Ethnic balancing of the public service is occurring under the PPP, but in a discriminatory fashion.
Maybe Kissoon’s numbers showing Indianization atop the ministries and departments he mentioned, do not represent the entire traditional public sector, but in this sector where Indians have chosen and opted to not join, for Indians to assume the majority or a significant proportion of management and supervisory positions when Indians represent just a small minority is evidence of ethnic discrimination practised by the PPP in those ministries and departments.
This struggle by Indians and Africans for dominance in this country will destroy this nation for all its races. Their push to fatten their own and to deny the other group creates inefficiencies and losses and promotes discrimination. Finally, many of the contracts which are being handed out by the PPP to their failed contractor cronies and friends were contracts that were done by the public sector in the past.
M. Maxwell

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