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President Granger has to stop being aloof
Dear Editor;
Minister Harmon issuance of 99 years leases to 135 residents of the community of Mocha/Arcadia must be given high praises for the sole reason that ordinary people have received lands. It is always a good thing for the poor people to secure land and whoever granted those lands will always grow politically, even if their intent is self-serving. This activity will serve Mr. Harmon well in his march to be the next leader of the PNC. Move out the way Basil Williams, your performance on the RED HOUSE Affairs exposes you as a self-serving politician and political lightweight.
But in any society, there must be land ethics. There is one thing the PPP always got right; its political optics. I will be the first to acknowledge that the bulk of the land transferred from the State during the PPP time went to a small cabal of East Indian men like Vic Oudit and others of that PPP ilk. But at the same time, the PPP made a deliberate tactical political move to ensure that Afro-Guyanese like Odinga Lumumba became one of the largest Afro-Guyanese landowners in the Caribbean.
Plus it is to the PPP’s credit that more than 60% of the Amerindian villages secured their own long-term land leases. So even though most of the land distributed went to its East Indian cabal, serious land distribution was made to all other ethnicities. Thus all benefitted, even if the system was biased towards the Vic Oudits of Guyana.
The promises of Candidate Granger have now all “gone for channa” when he promised that he will be President of all of the Guyanese people. Well, we are now finding out that there is a huge variance between Candidate Granger and President Granger. The people who voted for this hastily pulled together coalition has to take note; can they live with a PNC leadership that is only prepared to use the budget to serve mainly PNC’s constituencies?
The PNC will never learn. This ethnocentric strategy was tried under Burnham and it ended up bankrupting Guyana. So why is the Granger government on this road once again? A divided country can never grow. Look at which areas got the US$10 million from the loan borrowed from the CDB.
One must look to successful multiracial societies like Singapore and Mauritius to learn the lessons from them. President Granger has to stop being aloof and understand the fact that other types of Guyanese are feeling marginalized under his watch and just like how they did under the Burnham regime, will make his chances of coming out of this mess we find ourselves in today as an economy, close to impossible. Favourtism under this Granger government is alive and it is most unfortunate that people like the Christopher Rams of Guyana, who actively campaigned for the PNC to come to power, are all very silent today. Why? Have these people lost their sense of transparency and fairness all of a sudden?
Jai (Harry) Lall
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