Lennox Shuman’s visit to NYC raises hackles among PNCites

Oct 07, 2019 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Mr. Lennox Shuman, leader of the Liberal & Justice Party (better known as the Amerindian Party) visited New York City over the weekend – and addressed two Guyanese Town Hall meetings (Saturday Oct 5th): one in Richmond Hill, Queens and the other in Brooklyn.
He was well received. Several people in the Queens audience told me he made a very good case for better representation of the Indigenous peoples of Guyana at the national level. Schuman told the audience the politicians think of Amerindians as a people to visit at election season, shower gifts, collect their votes – and then leave. Only to return at the next election cycle with their gift bags.
Mr. Shuman said his people don’t’ need gift bags. They need sustainable programmes and long-term planning to help them achieve the same standard of living as the coastland people. And, this is the raison d‘etre for him entering politics. He said his people have been shut out for too long at the executive level in national politics.
One anecdote resonates. For centuries, the “Indigenous peoples” (his favourite term) grew food crops, fish and drink the water from the creeks and rivers. Now they cannot eat the fish nor drink the water. All the creeks and rivers have been poisoned with mercury from gold mining. Gold mining is a riverain industry, but the riverain areas are also the home of the Indigenous peoples. Filtered water costs $700 (US3.50) a bottle. Not having much of a cash economy they cannot afford clean drinking water.
Meanwhile, there is another newsworthy story surrounding Mr. Shuman’s visit to New York City. Professor Rose who organised the meeting in Brooklyn used an email chain containing a hundred names to send out notice of Mr Schuman’ meeting. It appears this email chain is considered the exclusive property of a PNC group based in Brooklyn. (Email chain considered private property?).
Professor Rose’s handiwork raised hackles among PNCites. One wrote this: “I refrain from getting into debates politically, but since you are re-using a list that I sent out announcing a town Hall meeting by Guyana’s Foreign Minister on her visit to the US, and I have just seen on this mail an acrimonious and divisive statement that was made with blatant disregard for the truth. I am forced to reply so that no one on this list would unwittingly feel that I am in support of this charade.
“If this is your platform, let me state that Guyana is a land of six peoples. The president of Guyana serves All the people of Guyana; therefore, this hateful stance of INDIAN and AFRICAN Parties is a poor ploy to Disrupt instead of Codify. Guyana does not need another race baiter. Guyana is on the move to a homogeneous Nation. I do not know who your advisors are but Please DO NOT INCLUDE MY NAME on any correspondence”.
Several persons responded by asking their names to be dropped from the list. Were they so offended to receive an invitation to attend a meeting of the leader of the Indigenous people’s party?
Editor, please indulge me to make this point. Guyana is a land of extreme race politics. Indian and African peoples vote at extremely high levels (at least 94% strong) for their respective ethnic parties. So, what is so wrong if the Indigenous peoples do the exact same thing the Indians and Africans have been doing for the last 60-years?
The PNCite wrote: “Guyana is on the move to a homogeneous Nation”. If anything, the opposite is true. Guyana has become a more hardened racially divided nation in the last 4-years. Reading the national papers and scanning the pictures will provide you ample proof. The other races that inhabit this nation are literally squeezed out, shut out from the social, economic, political life of this nation.
When “almost every last man votes for his own ethnic/racial party” – that system is called consociational democracy. Same thing is called Apanjhaat democracy. Lots of PhD dissertations on this type of democracy have been done at Universities in the Netherlands. The problem in Guyana is that we have a deformed type of Consociational democracy – the people vote race alright, but the benefits and resources are not distributed proportionally or equally to all the races. The party that wins the elections wins an ethnic prize – and the National Treasury is generally utilised mostly for the benefit of that victorious group.
The question that needs to be debated seriously at the national level in Guyana is: How do Guyanese people by themselves, of themselves change that type of politics?
M. Persaud

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