Honouring Dr. Walter A. Rodney

Jun 12, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – Respect and trust are crucial for successful, productive relations with each other. They are important for our personal welfare that we can determine whether the people whom we relate to, be they siblings, spouses, employers, government, respect us, and that we can trust them. This is because if respect and trust is lacking, persons generally find themselves being misled, robbed, or subjected to various forms of abuse.

It is important also for us to understand if we have or are being trained or conditioned to feel inferior, to accept disrespect and abuse as normal, because some societies, cultures, incorporate this as part of their system of organization, management. Persons who find this to be the case, need to do whatever is needed to end such relationships, especially since they may well be exposing themselves to all kinds of disrespect or abuse being perpetrated against them under this type of system or culture.

The basis of respect is honesty and regard for each other’s welfare. If persons discover that they are being lied to, then the person or persons lying to them does not respect them, considers them mentally inferior, to be made a fool of, and if possible, can be abused. Respect especially also demands that your ideas and opinions are respected, decisions taken must be fair and beneficial to yourself, the welfare of your family.

Respect, and competence also, are especially important in politics, and this is something Guyanese are urged to contemplate at our local government and upcoming national elections a few years from now. Have our politicians been honest with us? Do they listen to us, consider our welfare and act in our best interests? Are we happy with our standard of living, our incomes? Are our children being provided with the kind of education that prepares them to succeed in our increasingly challenging local and global environment? Are we benefiting from our natural resources? Are our politicians developing and following guidelines, regulations, laws designed to maximize the benefit of our natural resources to Guyanese? Here we consider the incomes of public and private sector workers, old pensions, alternative economic prospects for sugar workers, investments in our human capital, and contracts like the existing Government of Guyana/Exxon contract. We also consider education and health care services. Have our politicians been delivering on these fundamental issues for us?

Do our politicians understand that they are public servants who received our vote and trust to manage our social and economic welfare? Voting is a serious matter about which we should all be concerned, because we are voting also to pay the salaries of our politicians. Not voting is also a very important choice, because if voters can’t find politicians they can trust to represent their interests, it makes no sense to have them in office. In the absence of credible, competent politicians to administer our affairs, we as a society have the responsibility of producing politicians and political parties capable of administering our local and national governments. More and more Guyanese are raising their voices to address the banal injustices and gross disrespect meted out by our major political parties. After years criticizing and highlighting our governments’ abysmal failures, these persons should recognize that they are the change that they, we are looking for. Many Guyanese have recognized the failure of ethnic politics, that this has been the source of much of our social and economic demise, and as the 2015 elections has shown, are willing to take a chance on something else, as much as this turned out to be an abysmal failure. As we move beyond Local Government Elections, the DNC proposes a public forum to discuss prospects for our future.

America, Britain, many European countries and other strong democratic nations walked in the steps we are taking, endured much social struggle to realize the achievements they enjoy in their advances in social and economic welfare. Guyana is in a power struggle, a power shift, where our desire for higher incomes, better standards of living, improved social and economic progress through strengthened regulation, laws, systems of governance and accountability is up against the forces which have in the past benefited from the existing weak systems and want to maintain the status quo. We can only achieve real advances by overcoming those who would retain the existing system, to keep things working for their benefit.

I take this opportunity also to observe and honor the work and life of Dr. Walter A. Rodney, who the Commission of Inquiry into his death requested by former President Donald Ramotar had determined had been a political assassination orchestrated by Burnham and the People’s National Congress on June 13, 1980. (https://www.walterrodneyfoundation.org/coi/report-the-commission-of-inquiry-on-the-death-of-walter-rodney-february-2016) I have been fortunate to meet one of his grandchildren. Our political historians and commentators will do a more comprehensive job than I at memorializing his work, but I offer these few words. Dr. Walter Rodney had stalwart colleagues and friends in Eusi Kwayana, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, Dr. Clive Thomas who together sought to counter Burnham and the PNC. As someone who has shared the pain of having an enslaved African as an ancestor, it is with great sorrow that I contemplate his death, that he could have come from no lower a background to achieve the international respect and acclaim he did, only to have his life snuffed out for standing up and defending our democracy against the injustices of the incompetent and challenged PNC. They left a young wife and children to mourn the loss of a husband, a father. This is a crime that will forever stand in our history as a stain against us, that we continue to allow the organization and those who killed him to go unpunished. Where our established laws fail, we as a people must use our innate sense of justice to condemn the perpetrators of his death, to end the criminal dictatorial politics which continues to prevail in our society, to protect us from ever having to live through what Guyanese endured under Burnham’s rule. My regrets to the family of Dr. Walter Rodney, that his children, grandchildren may rise to stand on his shoulders to serve society as he did.

Sincerely
Craig Sylvester