Your civic duty

Jun 28, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The national clean-up exercise is ongoing. And it is aggravating those persons who have visceral hatred of the PPP/C.
They would have wanted nothing better than for the national clean-up to be a one-off exercise. This would have allowed them to bad mouth the PPP/C government and to perpetuate the narrative that the PPP/C is keeping the country nasty.
But what was most interesting is the new narrative which has greeted this second round of the national clean-up exercise. Suddenly, the use of the army and the police has become a subject of controversy.
It never was during the first phase of the clean-up. But now that the naysayers who predicted, publicly and privately, that there will be no follow-up have been proven wrong, a red herring has been thrown into the works.
Persons have ventured onto Tik Tok to criticise the use of the army and police in these operations. But those criticisms are without merit.
One person has questioned how could persons who have to defend the state be used to clean-up rubbish. Every solider is a citizen, unlike Burnham who wanted to make every citizen a soldier. As such, every citizen is expected to play his or her part in keeping his or her surroundings, community and country clean.
What is wrong with asking a member of the Disciplined Services to take part in a national clean-up exercise? Is it not their civic duty to do so? Are they above doing menial work? And if this is so, why then should the President and his Ministers be similarly engaged? If the President can pick up a rake, a broom and a shovel and help in the clean-up drive, then what is wrong with the uniformed services doing the same? If they should not be involved in the clean-up exercise then a similar argument can be made that no one should be. They are leading by example and the country should be proud of this new thrust of civic work being undertaken by the Disciplined Services.
Another person has said that under Burnham they were not required to do this sort of work. He said that it is only persons in the army and prisoners who did so. He does not know what he is talking about.
Not only were the hierarchy of the Disciplined Services Forced to attend the Congresses of the ruling PNC but they were also expected to bring best wishes and pledge their support to the paramount party, under Burnham.
Walter Rodney in a street corner address entitled, People’s Power, No Dictator” explained the degrading of the police and army under Forbes Burnham. This is what he said: “The fate of the Army and Police can serve as other examples of the trickery which built the Burnham dictatorship. According to the Guyana Constitution, each soldier or policeman takes an oath of loyalty to this country symbolised by the Head of State. Each soldier or policeman is expected to be loyal to the commands of an elected government representing the people. Little by little since independence, loyalty to the country became loyalty to the PNC and then personal loyalty to Burnham. The uniformed forces helped the PNC to beat down the majority opposition in 1973 and then by July 1978 they were helping Burnham to steal the rights of 90 percent of the population – including the rights of many former supporters of the PNC. One wonders whether the soldiers and police realised when they stopped being loyal to the country and started being the watch-dogs of a dictator?”
Burnham humiliated the army by forcing its members to be scabs during strikes by sugar workers. He urged them to help save the economy by providing scab labour in the hope that it would break the will of the strikers. During the 1977 sugar strike, soldiers were deployed as scabs in the sugar fields, without any declaration of a state of emergency.
Those scabs did more damage than good. They were strike breakers rather than economy savers. They did not have a clue what to do and did untold damage to the young sugar cane shoots. This led to problems in the subsequent crop.
Public servants – both senior and junior were expected to provide occasional free labour in return for the right to buy scarce food supplies. They were shuttled to Hope Estate which Burnham treated as if it was his personal plantation. Workers were required to weed and clean the trenches while Burnham rode around on horseback as if he were a plantation owner.
There is nothing wrong or even degrading about asking the army and police to be involved in the national clean-up exercise. Those who are desperately scrounging for reasons to discredit such involvement must themselves respond to the civic call to keep their surroundings clean.
(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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