Guyanese need to take stock of themselves

Feb 03, 2023 Letters

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Dear Editor,

The following has been submitted for consideration and adoption as our supplemental motto, a contemplation to guide our national affairs: ‘A country which fails to defend its democracy, the human rights of its citizens, consents to and justifies the abuses of its government.’  We should also consider that when we vote for abusive politicians, we are agreeing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to abuse us and rob us of national wealth, as is currently being done with the Exxon contract.

May we call to mind our ancestors who did their best, struggled against all odds, sacrificed even their lives in some cases, to give us life, whatever legacy they left us under the oppressive system they endured to the end of their days. Especially we remember those who died these last thirty years, some in poverty, some in a state of insufficiency, unable to provide comfortably for themselves even after retirement, the value of their labour stolen by the government which orchestrated their lives of impoverishment, your lives.  We are their successes, and we owe it to them, our children, our children’s children, to continue to work with each other to overcome the oppressive and abusive state of affairs in which our governments have placed us through the decades.

Guyanese today are the bridge from the past endured by our ancestors, to the future we continually struggle to define for ourselves, our children. As we have continually witnessed through the last ten to fifteen, twenty years, many of us have found ourselves taken advantage of by our governments and the systems they employ in managing our affairs. Especially in the last ten years we have come to understand that our politics and our political actors have and continue to be the source of our poverty, insufficiency and substandard welfare we are forced to endure. We still have yet to grasp that we are being programmed into accepting who we have become, that we are the fault of our failings and insufficiencies.

We have yet to accept that we have and continue to be manipulated for political gain, to keep us from attaining a proper education, from becoming financially independent, because if we as a people did become educated beyond the limitations placed upon us by our governments, if we did become financially independent of government, we would understand that our politicians have only been using us, that they have no regard for proper systems of government, because these would keep them from engaging in corruption and transfers of massive sums of our hard-earned taxpayers’ dollars to their families and friends.  Never to forget Fip Motilall and the US38.0 million road to Amaila Falls and the G$400,000 CJIA toilet bowls.  Many of our current crop of government officials have been recipients of massive handouts of land and other forms of wealth to keep them from speaking out against the injustices and welfare abuses against our citizens, whether these be public servants, retired persons or our young people, many of whom continue to leave school in the thousands each year without the level of education to secure a proper job as a clerk at any of our commercial banks.  Together they have trampled upon the life of Dr. Cheddi Jagan, gutted his party and transformed it into a money-making machine for themselves. They, and Bharrat Jagdeo, have stolen the legacy of Dr. Cheddi Jagan.

Instances of the programming to which I refer abound, and start from the conditioning of (1) rice farmers to accepting the losses and abuses perpetuated by rice millers against them, with the scoundrels walking free, rich men and women who retain high offices, (2) sugar workers who hold on to whatever they can get from an industry that has been clinically dead since billions of taxpayers’ dollars started being pumped into the sugar industry to keep it afloat, these poor workers, many if not all without any proper secondary school education, being maintained for their votes at national elections; (3) approximately seventy-five percent of the population who leave school without a proper primary or secondary education who easily believe that they weren’t good enough, but do not understand that it is the government’s education system, from top, to bottom, which failed them, in providing motivated teachers, in providing adequate educational facilities at many of our schools (everyone knows there is a stark difference between both the quality of education and the physical school facilities between Queen’s College and St. George’s, Christ Church.

Yet these discriminatory aspects are enforced and maintained across the country to keep certain classes of society from having an opportunity at achieving much if anything at examinations); (4) public servants whose rights continue to be trampled upon by the president himself, his administration, many of whom have yet to come to terms with the fact that government owes them millions of dollars because they (government) willfully disregarded regulations governing determination of salaries and wages through the years, subject to a decision by our courts; (5) sections of the population which seek to earn a living from growing cannabis sativa, even as this product has been legalised in America, Canada and has become a multi-billion dollar industry, becoming criminalised because our governments do not want them become financially independent and provide a decent life and education for their children; (6) the thousands of workers in the private sector, whether on Regent Street or in some shop or business in Linden, Buxton, Charity, New Amsterdam or the Corentyne, who have to endure oppressive wages and conditions from even successful, and because there are little or no job alternatives or adequate supplemental training facilities and financial support mechanisms; (7) our nation’s vendors who have been conditioned to wage war for space that is not theirs, for the right to encroach on other people’s businesses, who government has ensured have no rightful place in society, something they will defend with their lives; (8) retired persons who have been conditioned to being robbed of their rightful retirement benefits after adjustment cost of living adjustments through the decades, many having died with their stolen wages in the pockets of government.

This manipulation and commitment by of our governments to continue to disregard our laws, the regulations established to prevent abuses against our workers, our environment, our marginalized populations (it has become clear that our governments have little care or concern for specific groups based on political grounds, as much have they have borrowed from my ideas of reaching into and developing our communities), brings to the surface what I, we had been hoping would not be relived: that there would be no end to the disregard for our laws and regulations, that this administration of the PPP will continue abuse our workers, our citizens, will continue to spend on projects without proper oversight, establish institutions to function and make decision in the absence of parliamentary approval, essentially rendering the administration a cake shop where they can do and spend in the absence of parliamentary approval.  Unless we make any meaningful effort to stop these abuses, we will live and die in the poverty and insufficiency endured by our parents and grandparents.

Guyanese continue to observe CANU carrying out its searches and arrests of persons for marijuana while money-laundering on the scale of billions of dollars continues right before our eyes, while known narcotics actors wash their ill-gotten gains in our economy, even establishing security firms fully equipped with arms and the latest technology, more of the same, for those fully aware of the PPP’s ties to the underworld in Guyana.

In contemplating our present and immediate future, we have to come around to the reality that Guyana has a dysfunctional democracy.  As much as we can joke and ridicule the PNCR for its obtuse voting mechanisms at its internal elections, this we cannot do at all for the PPP.  Because the PPP does not have constituency elections with elected representatives.  To the best of my knowledge, the PPP is not a democratic institution which allows persons to be elected to serve. Its ‘representatives/technocrats’ represent no one. All members have to toe the line.

There’s one master of the gang. Jagdeo.  And that’s in a nutshell. Guyanese are up against an anti-democratic styled government, intent on entering the global big league by sharing away our national wealth, which turns a blind eye to wholesale money-laundering activities while hunting down poor Guyanese trying to make a living on what in America and Canada a perfectly legal, legitimate commercial activity, and is intent on marginalising sections of society for political ends. On the other we have an opposition which smashed its image as a national political party, and is ready and willing to rig and steal any election in which it happens to be in government. I have in the past compared the PPP to a mafia organization due to its ties to our local narcotics trade. The PPP has no elections where its members have constituencies.

Guyana’s teachers want their due adjustments to their salaries in addition to the amounts outstanding over the years the administration the terms of collective bargaining with their representative union.  It is time this government paid us our money.  Guyanese have a lot to think about regarding their welfare, their children. They have decisions to make.

Yours Faithfully,

Craig Sylvester

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• CJIA, Craig Sylvester, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, Exxon, Guyanese

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