Empower not stultify

Jun 01, 2017 Editorial, Features / Columnists

One of the fallouts of our system of governance that incorporates an institutionalised opposition is the encouragement of the latter to focus on identifying either the missteps of the government, or on their inability to fix the various ailments that may afflict the body politic.
And that creates its own dilemma. From the days when the “body politic” was one and the same with the ruler, government is still identified with the country and the constant carping on the unfortunate creates the impression that the country is in a pathological state.
This is not to suggest that we as a society and a people do not have our share of problems. After two hundred years of slavery, eighty years of indentureship, decades of being a Crown Colony then exploited as a pawn in the machinations of the superpowers in their global Cold War, it would be surprising if we did not.
But in constantly describing us in pathological terms, the self-fulfilling prophecy is created in the minds of our people that we ourselves are somehow incapable of severing the unremitting cycles of political convulsions that have kept us mired in poverty.
What is ironic is that the societal mind-set that the opposition is helping to foster is actually acting against their interest – which is to take the place of the present government at the helm in charge of the country’s affairs. A people that are convinced that they are somehow flawed do not have the self-confidence to make the radical break with a situation that might actually be holding them back.
In our estimation, what is needed in Guyana today is an affirmation in our people that, as a matter of fact, they are signally capable of engendering change, precisely because of who they are.
Take the issue of poverty. The opinion-shaping elites in politics and the media incessantly drum into our heads the message that Guyana is unremittingly stuck in the jaws of poverty, so grinding that we are just a bunch of “starving guts”. But the reality is that the ordinary Guyanese citizen, by and large, has been able through dint of hard work, creativity and persistence been able to put food on the table through thick and thin. They should be credited for this accomplishment.
If it is to be asserted that the government is not doing enough to create the conditions for a higher standard of living (and this could always be asserted, even in the best of times) then such complaints have to be distinguished from the everyday heroic success of the ordinary man and woman.
Another feature of the proclivity towards the total-blame gamesmanship that dominates the intellectual and media discourse is its insistence on criticising dysfunctional symptoms rather than examine structural root causes that precipitate the said symptoms.
“Crony capitalism” is high on the list of our alleged pathological condition and one that has supposedly kept us impoverished. The expression is tautological. If the economy were to be privatised does anyone expect that the corporations picking up the previously nationalised companies would not exploit the weak condition of the government after the collapse of our economy?
The question of the development of any third world country, enmeshed in the web of underdevelopment, cannot be severed from the question of the form of economic strategy that is being pursued. Each strategy will have its own consequences.
Yes, we need a politics against corruption, graft and nepotism etc. But if we are ever to be free (or freer) of these ailments, politicians and all opinion-shapers will have to practice politics that empowers rather than stultifies the ordinary people and simultaneously present an alternative realistic plan to change the structural underpinnings of the status quo.

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