Exodus, but it is not the movement of Jah people

Mar 06, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

This newspaper has published details of US Embassy figures, whereby the embassy processes 20 to 30 Guyanese families each week. Important to note is that it wasn’t an individual applicant, but families. Each unit (family) contains several persons.
The Embassy did not give a breakdown by ethnicity, but it is widely known that a majority of these immigrants are East Indians. Go to Berbice and your eyes cannot miss the countless empty houses. Over a twenty-year period, Berbice has lost a staggering number of its citizens.
My wife’s parents, all of her uncles and aunts from both parents and many cousins were/are from Wakenaam, so I am a bit familiar with this Essequibo Island. Wakenaam has been steadily losing its citizens to the point where from the 1980s to the present time, I would say almost half of its people are gone from Guyana. Wakenaam is ninety-nine percent people of East Indian ancestry.
What we are witnessing in Guyana is exodus alright, but not the Rastafari people that Bob Marley sang about in his famous song. We are seeing the massive outflow of East Indians from Guyana. But the US Embassy statistics do not tell the entire story.
The statistics of Indian departure includes illegal migration to Canada and the US; legal migration to Canada; legal and illegal migration to Suriname, Trinidad, Antigua and Barbados. It came as a complete surprise to this country when then Prime Minister of Barbados, David Thompson, began his midnight round-up of illegal residents. Of the Guyanese sent back, a majority were Indians. It was because of their visible presence that the police knew where to find them.
The phenomenon of frenetic departure of Indians is sociological madness. Guyanese Indians are not willing to remain here. Recently, the government used a process that it is known to engage in everyday – naked conspiracy – when it announced that the ethnic breakdown of the 2014 census will be published in the second half of 2015. But the figures are quite easy to guess.
Under both PNC presidents, Indians went out in countless numbers. Then came the PPP and ironically the numbers jumped. Why between 1970 and 1990 under the PNC government did fewer Indians migrate than between 1992 and 2014? We are talking about two decades respectively under both PNC and PPP Government.
Because birth certificates, passports, Canadian and American visas during the PNC days were hard to get and Guyanese were less welcomed in the Caribbean.
Today, Canada has self-sponsorship, American visas are easier to get, CARICOM offers the certificate of skilled citizens that makes it easy to land a job in the region. Indians since 1992 have been deserting Guyana. A declining Berbice is graphic evidence. What is the explanation? Whatever it is, there is no space to ruminate on such a complex factor, but the exodus has tremendous implications for politics.
Just one example should suffice – the Luncheon presidential bid that I expanded on in my Monday column. Dr Luncheon made his move in 1997 out of the calculation that Indians were in the majority and that the PPP, not he, Luncheon, would get the votes. That was a long time ago. The exodus has dissolved the ambition of people like Luncheon, Rohee and the lady you find in two of Tennessee Williams plays – Gail Teixeira (the two plays are, “Orpheus Descending” and “The Milk Man Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.”
The elementary fact of politics in today’s Guyana is that the Indians have lost their majority. There is no longer an Indian electoral majority that can make a Luncheon or a Rohee a president. This configuration has played the crucial part in the formation of the electoral alliance between APNU and the AFC.
All over Guyana the talk is that AFC will lose Indian votes because of the coalition with the PNC. I think they will lose middle-aged Berbicians, but the loss will not be substantial. However, this time around the AFC will pick up more Indian votes because of the youth factor.
But let us assume that all Indians vote for the PPP in May, it cannot bring a majority because the total Indian population is not a majority and the ethnic population of a race group does not correspond with the percentage in the electorate.
That is simple to understand. If the Indians are forty percent; in that number will be under-18 kids who cannot vote. And the Amerindian population will have to vote totally for the PPP to achieve a majority. The 2011 election poll showed the Amerindian vote was split. The exodus of East Indians is the PPP’s nemesis.

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