Guyana today and the words of Joshua Nkomo

Feb 14, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

After the fallout between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Mugabe turned on Nkomo with vengeance and brutality. Nkomo made a statement that reverberates all over the post-colonial world today.
He said that he was more persecuted by his fellow Zimbabwean, Mugabe, than by Ian Smith, the white man against whom he led a guerrilla war.
It was a profound reflection on the failure of revolutionary humanity that started with bestialities directed by the Bolshevik Party leaders in communist Russia in 1919 against their own comrades who dissented. Stalin killed more Russians in one year than the Tsar the Bolsheviks overthrew, killed in twenty years.
In Iran today, the number of State-sponsored murders since the overthrow of the Shah in 1978 makes the Shah look like an Iranian hero. Under Castro in Cuba, the chances of escaping jail were one in a million if found in possession of a Time magazine. This was the man the Cubans violently removed Baptista for.
After WW2, in the Third World, the office of the white colonial ruler became untenable. Facing anger from the masses led by the local educated classes, the white man was painted as the devil incarnate, an imperialist rapist, a hater of non-white civilization. Violence chased him out in many Third World states while in other colonies he packed his bags and left hurriedly.
Seventy-five years after the white man was scorned and urged to leave the Third World, if a referendum was taken in 2013, a majority of the population in each post-colonial territory would give permission for the white man to return. In Jamaica, a poll found that citizens preferred the days when England was in control of the island.
It would be most fascinating to learn what the results would be of such a survey in Guyana in 2013. I spent some investigative time last year on one particular sugar estate.
What I found was an unchanging country. The estate workers literally hated their management staff whom they told me were more arrogant, and less mannerly than the colonial sugar bosses.
This was life on the sugar estate in 2013, some 75 years after the first local political party was formed to kick the white man out of Guyana.
If science could make the dead come alive, all Guyanese would give their last cent to hear what Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan have to say about the Government of Guyana that signed a contract with a Chinese company to undertake a construction here and agreed that no Guyanese personnel would be employed.
Rewind the tape to 1947 when that first political party was founded. If the white man was building a soda factory and he brought only Englishmen to work and stipulated no locals would be employed, Her Majesty’s Government in London would have had to send troops to quell the ensuing riots and stop the fire that would have engulfed the drinks factory.
Colonialism has come back with a vengeance.
The no-local policy at Marriott Hotel construction site must be the only one of its kind in the world. In a world raging out of control with a tempestuous reclamation of 19th century nationalism, no developed country allows foreigners to come in and take a job for which a local is available. Leonard Craig, the current chairman of the People’s Parliament told me the Marriott enigma would be impossible in Germany where he lived.
I know in Canada that a nanny would only be given a work permit if there is no Canadian available for the job and the vacancy must be advertised.
In the US, there is a law that prevents the media landscape of the country to have more than fifty percent foreign ownership.
The Marriott labour abomination is not the only evidence that colonialism has returned to Guyana. Permission has been given for the Chinese Government to operate a television channel while the people of Linden, through governmental policy, are not allowed to see the signals of other stations except NCN and Region Ten is yet to get approval to operate their own television station.
And while the Chinese enjoy their rising hegemony, memories of apartheid came alive at Timehri on Tuesday morning where bulldozers demolished the livelihood of dozens of vendors who were there for more than forty years.
The Guyanese post-colonial autocrats in 2010 abolished prescriptive rights by an Act of Parliament so if you were on the land for a hundred years, your right to it is gone. This is Guyana.

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Guyana today and the words of Joshua Nkomo

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