THE TRUTH WE AVOID

Dec 19, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The elephant has been staring us in the face for too long. But rather than admit to the presence of the elephant, we constantly attempt to pass judgment on it.
We dabble with the superficial rather than addressing the substantive causes of our present predicament. A recent panel discussion involving well-intentioned persons highlighted the sort of superficial solutions which are often proposed in addressing the problems of Guyana. And yet the truth continues to stare us in the face.
That truth is two-fold: political and economic. The first part, the political problem, is that our country is multi-ethnic but there are two main dominant ethnic groups with the majority of persons in each group wanting to be ruled by their own.
Election after election has long established the fact. The central issue dictating voting patterns among the majority of the population is the desire to be ruled by their own.
Instead of accepting this reality, we condemn ethnic voting and polarisation. And we lecture about the importance of principles rather than ethnic choices. The public we intone must cast aside ethnic preferences in their political choices and vote on the basis of issues.
But we have failed to convince ourselves. Even those who have so bravely argued for some form of power sharing or greater inclusion have failed to convince their constituents. The bottom line is that the majority are not interested in power sharing but in holding power. And there is no successful model of power sharing anywhere around to act as a guide.
The APNU+AFC promised to share power were it to be elected. It reneged on this pledge no sooner had it tasted the honey of power. And the majority of its supporters were hardly likely to have countenanced the sharing of power with the PPP/C.
The PPP/C came in to office in August 2020 waving the banner of political inclusion. But as we have seen, its idea of inclusion is to neutralise opposition by buying-out it prospective opponents. Its obsession with control has caused it to even dismantle inclusion in overseeing the oil and gas sector.
Despite this, we continue with the belief that a time will come when with the right politicians and policies, the ethnic polarisation will disappear. But we are only fooling ourselves.
We are not alone in this regard. We are not the only country in which there is ethnic polarisation in politics. Trinidad and Tobago has the same issue but they have remained more stable because each side accepts when it loses elections. Not so easy in Guyana.
It is not as if one side no longer has any chance of ever gaining political office. As the elections of 2011 and 2015 have shown, each of country’s major political groups have a good chance now of being democratically elected to power. The demographics have changed. East Indians are no longer a majority. The mixed races and Amerindians are now critical voting blocks. There is no need to resort to rigging.
The second part of the truth, which we ignore is the economic question. Since the days of colonialism, we have always been rigidly stratified economically. There has always been a small economic oligarchy, a larger middle class and a huge class of poor people. And the gap between each of these classes has been growing.
The middle class may have expanded because of the increase in the bureaucratic and professional middle class. Poverty has also been reduced and this has created the illusion of reducing income gaps. But the reality is that the income gaps between the oligarchic class, the middle class and the poor have widened.
The PPP/C and the PNC/R have both abandoned the radicalism of their founders, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. The APNU+AFC and the PPP/C have both found it comfortable to pursue new-liberal economic policies. These policies however, have an undeniable track record of increasing rather than decreasing inequality.
These are the realities with which we are confronted but which we avoid. We have to live with ethnic polarisation but accept that no one side now has a permanent lien on political power. Change is possible through the ballot.
We also have to end the petty squabbling about which race is monopolising the economic pie and realise that this squabbling obscures the reality that the gap between the rich and poor is widening. But we must also face the reality that with the present neo-liberal approach to economic development, the poor – of all races – will be doomed under such a system.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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