Can the combined opposition win a sixty percent majority?

Sep 04, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In no other Caricom country except Guyana, (and Haiti which is understandable given its history) is there such a volcanic divide between the rich strata and the working classes. The drastic decline in the living standards of the masses has reached a boiling point.
In a country where elections can result in change of government, there is no explanation as to why Indian constituencies stayed with the PPP in the 2011 elections when there was an AFC challenge. The PPP’s record of service to the working classes under Mr. Jagdeo’s leadership has been shamelessly cruel. In Guyana today, the poor classes have never been poorer.
Look around this country you see the kind of capitalism that perhaps only the United States would tolerate. Scholars have argued that the critiques against capitalism are misplaced, because the model that is always used is the United States, and the US has a type of capitalism that is not capitalism but something devilish.
Leonard Craig, fellow social activist, who is a student in Germany, told me that for all of Merkel’s pro-capitalist ideology, Germany’s capitalist system and in Europe itself have no resemblance to the system in the US. According to Craig, there are satisfactory levels of welfare delivery in Europe. Craig went on to explain that some of the entitlements Germans get would be unimaginable in the US, like free university education.
When you see the Scandinavian model of capitalism then the argument has to be tempered, because capitalism in the Scandinavian states may not be capitalism after all. The lower classes enjoy a handsome life. I lived in Canada and though it is right next door to the US, Canadian capitalism is essentially patterned after the European tradition. The election next year in the UK is a straight fight between the Conservatives and a Labour Party that wants to reshape British capitalism so it can offer more to the working classes.
In Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica, there are higher levels of income for working people compared to Guyana. In fact, university education is free. What an irony. In Guyana, where the ruling party has a constitution that proclaims socialism, the children of working people have to pay for a tenth rate university degree, and the fees went up last month.
Thousands of working people bite the bullet and send their children to private schools and private hospitals. Last year I went to Balwant Singh Hospital for an eye operation. One could just look around and see who the hundreds of patients waiting for treatment were. A substantial percentage of them were not from the upper middle class and the richer strata.
They know that free medical services from the state are unreliable and unsatisfactory. They know that the public school infrastructure has broken down. The education system in this country is bestial. Results for the past decades show that outside of Region 4, the schools from the other nine regions do not do well. There has never been at least one prosecution of a business place that exploits young girls through the violation of the labour laws. At one Sheriff Street supermarket, employees are not given a weekly day off.
President Ramotar recently announced that miners will be given more concessions. But not a word about duty free cars and house lots and pay hikes for nurses, UG lecturers, teachers, and middle ranks of the security forces. Under President Burnham, there were two state-owned banks to nurture and guide small entrepreneurs. Our race divide has put an end to that since the PPP came to power.
In today’s Guyana, the contrast between the wealthy and the poor is graphically sickening. Yet in the upcoming general elections, poorer folks are going to walk into that polling station and vote for politicians who don’t care if they and their children have to eat mud for lunch.
On the campaign trail, the leaders from the incumbent party are going to spend hours on the platform every night telling their audience of their working class credentials. These audiences can just look around their village, not even having to go to another village, and they will see that those working class credentials are actually barefaced lies.
Guyana’s poverty and the misery of the working people are so sad that it takes a deranged mind to go into that polling booth and vote for people who after twenty-two years have done nothing for them. Maybe if the combined opposition gets into the groove they may pull off a sixty percent majority.

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Can the combined opposition win a sixty percent majority?

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