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Race Baiting
Nov 28, 2020 Front Page Comment, News
Kaieteur News – Just after the People’s Progressive Party lost the 2015 elections, they quickly accused the new A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change Coalition government of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Not a single case was however referred to the Constitutionally-sanctioned body, the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC).
Now, recent history has come full circle. Faced by increasingly embarrassing revelations about its giveaway of lands, both before and after it spent five months seeking to rig an election, the Coalition, now itself in opposition, is making serious and strenuous charges about ethnic targeting. When asked about whether or not a single case of this was reported to the ERC, the excuse given for not doing so was that this constitutional body was ineffective, with AFC Executive Cathy Hughes citing some nebulous complaint made just after elections which the ERC merely acknowledged. This is the same Hughes who around that time had made the perhaps equally credible complaint about secret Russians coming to Guyana to hack the elections and being deported.
It is clear that the standard distraction of losing incumbents, to avoid scrutiny of their corruption or wrongdoing by the new regime is to race bait. Both APNU and AFC, for example, have refused to speak to the particular charges of Bond’s arrest, and the surrounding issues of the massive land giveaway that took place under the Granger administration, even as it was defying the legal effect of the No Confidence Vote and trying to illegally and indecently overturn the will of the people after losing the March 2 elections.
That such an irresponsible statement should come from the PNC would not be surprising since it has been the PPP’s complement and twin in exploiting racial division in this country. That it should come from the AFC is not surprising either, just further proof that the party of change has now become an appendage of its coalition partner.
Ethnopoliticisation is the primary hurdle to Guyana’s development and has been since the pre-Independence era. What we need is a direct and honest conversation about how race divides us, and how it continues to infect our politics. What we continue to get however, perhaps expected from politicians, is cheap, insidious and exploitative racial theatre.
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