This is a frontal attack on the people’s right to economic self-determination

Dec 01, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor
The Kara Kara Bridge issue is the latest in the PPP’s 21 years of unrelenting attacks on the people of Linden/Region 10 and these attacks must stop! This is not only about the workers of Linden Town Council (LTC) and the generation of revenue to manage their affairs, it is a Rights issue and goes to the core of who we are as a people and what we are prepared to stand up and fight for as a nation. The Constitution’s supremacy is established in Article 8 which states, “This Constitution is the supreme law of Guyana and, if any other law is inconsistent with it, the other law shall, to the extent of its inconsistency, be void.” Invalidating a law can come through another law, act(s) of civil disobedience by the people for that law, or the creation of new laws to ensure what’s rightly theirs.  The Minister within the Ministry of Local Government, Norman Whittaker, is either being a bully or is out of his depth with his claims regarding the toll issue undertaken by the LTC.
The fact that there was a practice based on the government’s earlier approved provision to garner revenue which the minister sought to stop, and threatened workers with dismissal should they work the toll station, then turned around and had Cabinet approve money to pay wages, and this empty threat reinforced by the workers’ representative, the Guyana Labour Union (GLU), bears testimony to the minister’s ignorance of local government and the level this once formidable union has sunk under Carvil Duncan’s leadership. This is a frontal attack on the people’s right to economic self-determination, once respected, now arbitrarily taken away.
The ministry does not hire workers below the level of officers at the council level, which Whittaker and Duncan know. Those workers are hired by the council and answerable to the council who is responsible for the station and took the decision to continue working the station. This was a just decision because it was underscored by prior approval and taken away without agreement or judicial pronouncement. It is being thwarted because the government remains uncomfortable with the LTC self-determination. The PPP’s obsession to place communities in position of want so these arrogant narcissists can ‘come to the rescue’ is small-minded and a violation of fundamental rights. Lest they continue this mental contortion and society be misled, Cabinet’s approval to pay wages is money withdrawn from taxpayers’ contributions to the Treasury; there is no benevolence on the PPP’s part. On a governance point, it must also be ascertained if same was approved in the National Budget or part of their continued lawlessness to spend without approval and the LTC thrown in to silence the opposition. This too must be examined and there must be no silence if a wrong was committed.
Local government carries an inherent responsibility to ensure community development through revenue. The Constitution offers two approaches. Article 76- “Parliament may provide for regional democratic councils to raise their own revenues and to dispose of them for the benefit and welfare of their areas.” This article secures a deeper level of economic self-determination. And, Article 77 which stipulates, “The development programme of each region shall be integrated into the national development plans, and the Government shall allocate funds to each region to enable it to implement its development programme.”
The opposition parliamentary groups are encouraged to bring bills to the House to strengthen Article 76. Citizens in regions and towns the PPP lost have to confront the disregard for their budgets; refusal to respect elected representatives; refusal to honour rates and taxes obligation, and maintain Central Government’s role in proper maintenance of main roads and attendant drainage, seawalls, desilting the Rivers and environmental health. The continued imposition of Interim Management Committees must come to an end. So too must the denial of contracts and jobs to those within the community when they possess similar or better means and skills. This discriminatory policy denies the community and residents money for their development.
The situation in Region 10 is one of naked abuse of power by central government and its continued policy to deny a people economic empowerment in every sphere of their lives. It spreads the gamut from refusing to respect the right to collective bargaining for bauxite workers even as said right is respect for sugar workers; the destruction of bauxite workers’ Pension Plan by government’s refusal to allow workers to invest it, even as they safeguarded sugar workers’ Pension Plan to guarantee income on retirement by pumping tens of millions of tax payers’ dollars into it; the refusal to advance US$14M to for the rehabilitation of LINMINE which resulted in termination of all workers as they pumped over US$250M taxpayers’ money into Skeldon Sugar Factory which remains a white elephant;  the denial of tax-free overtime fought for by bauxite workers and extended to sugar workers under the PNC administration but to date is only enjoyed by sugar workers.
The refusal to entertain an offer by bauxite workers to buy BERMINE which was later given to RUSAL for nothing; the refusal to entertain an investment business proposal from an African group for the Everton Plant, preferring to have equipment worth U.S. tens of millions of dollars rot until years later the Plant was sold to an Indian friend of the PPP for next to nothing; the scavenging and removal of Linden electricity equipment to communities won by the PPP, followed by attempt to impose electricity hike under the pretext that subsidy has to end even as the government subsides electricity for consumers of the Guyana Power & Light, Mahdia Power Co, et al.; the vacillation in  respecting the 21 August 2012 Agreement signed between the Region 10 RDC and Central Government that would see the Region realising their plan for economic development and addressing the electricity issue; to the refusal to have the LTC engage in economic self-reliance even as this was allowed consistent with  the inalienable right to self-determination.
In other societies these unrelenting attacks on any community would have galvanised national outrage and deemed a crisis of national importance. I have called these assaults to economic sustenance economic genocide, a claim based on the United Nations Convention on Genocide. Only in Guyana where the Constitution promises a “system of governance…based on democratic values, social justice, fundamental human rights and the rule of law” some see glaring violations turn a blind eye or tell the violated these are not so.  Only in Guyana will a people be subject to these frontal attacks and told their situation present no clear and present danger to humanity, respect for law, justice and order. But it must not be only in Guyana we accept these wrongs and see it as the lot of a people or any group. It is not and we must resist it!  And this can only be achieved by bringing bills and realising laws to strengthen the democratic processes or through civil disobedience.
Lincoln Lewis

 

 

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