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The facts that were not in Sam Hinds’ box of facts
Dear Editor
Former Prime Minister, Sam Hinds, in his response to my charge that the PPP was not as generous to its opposite constituency as the present government is, failed to address my implicit point about the PPP’s praxis of ethno-political domination. The Prime Minister, a man for whom I have a political soft spot, is not a natural PPP man, but having hung out with that crowd for so long, he seems to have caught the fever. His letter to the press gave what he called “facts,” but his litany of facts excluded some real facts.
He excluded the fact that the PPP sought to remove the electricity subsidy from Linden and was still the government when the police shot at unarmed protestors, killing three. His facts excluded the fact that the PPP government for three years did not implement agreements it made with the representatives of Linden in the wake of the shootings. His facts did not include the fact that under the PPP, unemployment in Linden galloped, with the World Bank pegging it at 40% in 1999 and independent sources scoring it as high as 80% by the time of the protests in 2012.
The PM chose to forget to list in his “facts”, the fact that the PPP government subjected the people of Linden to information apartheid by ensuring that they only had access to PPP on the public airwaves. I challenge the PM and the PPP to prove me wrong that the quality of life in Linden did not drastically deteriorate under the PPP; that Linden was worse off in May 2015 than it was in October 1992. I challenge the PM to show how his facts led to the improvement in the quality of life in Linden.
My charge against the PPP was not confined to Linden, but PM Hinds chose to concentrate on Linden, perhaps because he had direct responsibility for that area. However, the Prime Minister must know that PPP governments were never kind to the mainly African Public Service. They reneged on two agreements arrived at under Cheddi Jagan in the early 1990s and famously refused to honour the ruling of the 1999 Arbitration Tribunal. That refusal was a central plank in what Lincoln Lewis referred to as “economic genocide.”
The Prime Minister must also know that the PPP never heeded repeated calls for Village Renewal; it never invested in Village Development. It instead instituted a vulgar form of clientelism in the African villages whereby it identified selected individuals, stuffed them with money, and they in turn served as enforcers and “Dons.” The Prime Minister obviously pretends ignorance of the marginalization of the core of Black contractors from government contracts under the PPP.
Finally, the PM said in his letter that his disagreement with me is total, including his disagreement with what he calls my “advocated world view and attitude.” Perhaps it is this totality that prevents him from seeing my point. He ended his letter by invoking the historical put-down of Black People as a group grounded in “perception and emotions.” Maybe he does not know that the construction of Black People as “emotional” is a racist formulation aimed at advancing the argument that they are incapable of being moved by “reason.” In defence of Black humanity and dignity, I wish to let PM Hinds know that African Guyanese do have powers of perception and do have emotions but that those perceptions and emotions arise out of reason and experience.
David Hinds
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