Guyanese replaced slave masters with political masters, one is like a Mafia boss

Nov 29, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

I observed recently that Guyanese have been abused by their Governments so much through the decades that they seem to have lost their identity, their sense of worth, dignity, are mentally defeated, and have lost hope in their governments. I further suggested that we needed to reconnect with our history, our fore-parents, to shock us back into the reality of our condition.

The majority of us have our roots in the sugar plantations spread along our coast centuries ago, being descendants of enslaved Africans or Indian immigrants conned into the bondage of indentureship. We need to reconnect with our ancestors while they endured slavery, indentureship, feel their pain, suffering, understand the brutality of their colonial masters and their governments who enlarged themselves on the sweat, blood, lives of our ancestors.  Many of the first Africans died trying to get away, were injured and rendered immobile in the effort, were beaten to force them into submission. While both African men and women were subjected to the most depraved forms of punishment to break and mentally enslave them, their women were subjected to sexual abuse, rape and some became regular concubines of either the slave masters themselves, or their underlings entrusted with instituting systematic abuse, as a means of degrading, demoralizing Africans, to ultimately break or keep their minds in submission.

Aside from being promised compensation for work on the sugar plantations, indentured Indians fared not much better off than enslaved Africans since, while they were willing to work, they were still subjected to the whip and other forms of physical abuse during the regular work-day.  Indian women also suffered rape and sexual abuse, becoming concubines in a similar manner as enslaved African women.  The indentured Indians resorted to all forms of rebellion and resistance to counter the brutality of plantation life, with many serving out their indentureship in the absence of viable alternatives of existence in colonial Guyana.

While many of the first arriving Africans and indentured Indians put up quite a bit of resistance, with many Africans losing their lives in the process, the second and subsequent generations of both Africans and indentured Indians did not put up as much resistance, because they didn’t know or understand freedom. The abuses of plantation life became the norm since they grew up witnessing and becoming victims themselves.  We ourselves are their descendants.  What we need to take away from all of this is many of us have been deliberately subjected to decades of impoverished conditions, working without fair and adequate compensation, always wanting, not being able to provide enough because our Governments have found all kinds of stories to put us off into the next year.  And so we suffer under the stain of insufficiency, not being able to own our own homes, not being able to provide proper meals for our children, watching them grow up and under-performing in an education system designed to keep the economically depressed in the financial and mental chains of bondage in which many public servant currently find ourselves.  We are being robbed by our Government of the better, happy, prosperous lives we should be leading. Because they have found it fit that we should suffer under their rule.

With close to a century having passed since slavery ended in Guyana in 1834, why is it that many Guyanese all across the country, whether in Essequibo, Berbice, Demerara, along the coast, inland, find themselves in a state of semi-slavery, working, but still unable to pay all the bills, unable to adequately provide for our children? The answer is that we have traded our slave masters for our governments.  Because it is our governments, through the decades, which have systematically engineered us into the poverty and insufficiency in which we find ourselves today. It is our Governments which are giving away our oil wealth and telling us about the sanctity of contracts, when that oil contract should be thrown out by the court because it is a piece of fraud.  That is the most rubbish a politician has sprouted in his lifetime, only outdone by that politician himself.  If a contract is fraudulent, it gets thrown out of court. If it fails to protect the rights of one party (in this case Guyanese), it can get thrown out by our courts.

It is almost a certainty that many Public Servants do not believe that they are due as much as $50,000, even $70,000 or $80,000 on their monthly salary, subject to a decision of a task force established to assess the true monthly adjustment needed to our salaries. Or that they are owed five to eight or more million dollars in income arrears because our Governments have willfully denied the collective bargaining process to avoid having to go to arbitration. But such is the reality.  By finding all means and mechanisms to ignore the collective bargaining process, our Governments have denied us the incomes due us from the outcomes to those wage negotiations. This is money that I submit that they owe all Public Servants, whether joint services, nurses, teachers, ancillary staff, or workers at Ministries and other State institutions.

History has shown that workers have had to fight for every dollar, every right they have earned in developed economies. It will be no different with workers in Guyana.  The only way workers can get their due salary increases, along with the millions in unpaid wages going back to 2002 is if they tell their government that they want their money. Because their Government had no intention of paying it in the first place.I know I want the salary increase due me.  And I want the six or however many millions of dollars the Government owes me since January 2012.  You can snap a single stick with two hands. If you tie a thousand of them together as one, it is impossible to break them.  I urge all public servants to stand together as one and tell this administration:  WE WANT OUR MONEY!!!Handouts are not the solution, because after debts and bills have been paid, we are still in the same hole!

Guyanese were finally able to rid themselves of Burnham.  The PPP will have to figure out how to get rid of the man who is controlling them and the country like a mafia boss.   For the sake of Dr. Cheddi Jagan who founded the PPP and mentored many of them, that should become their primary duty.

Sincerely,

Craig Sylvester

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