Filling the potholes of poverty on Guyana’s fast paced highway to development

Jun 18, 2023 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Poverty is an enigma that baffles most governments throughout the world. Heads of states and policy makers of every persuasion continue to grapple with the historicity of poverty in the hope of finding solutions. Grounded in the very foundation of societies, many third world leaders’ angst about poverty that proved repeatedly to be an elusive force in the course towards national development. In this regard, Guyana is not an exception.

The history of Guyana is one of colonial domination, exploitation, and oppression which expropriated enormous profits from the labour power of disenfranchised African slaves, and then impoverished East Indian indentured servants. Shipped to England, the profits benefitted residents of the so-called Mother Country who lived lives of luxuries while the labourers who produced the profits lived lives of squalor and abject poverty–the latter group supplementing their existence on garden crops, bartering and sharing.

The impoverishment of the Guyanese population is well documented by Walter Rodney, Dwarka Nath, Basdeo Mangru, and other Guyanese historians. They noted how colonizers designed an economic system of oppression and brutality that kept slaves, freedmen, and indentured dependent on the plantation for survival. And that while Guyana’s colonial overseers lived lavishly in secured residential compounds, plantation labourers existed in subservience and persistent poverty, housed in shacks considered unworthy of human habitation.

In reproducing control and passivity of the colonized population, the colonial planters class fashioned a system of subsistence existence and economic dependency that kept Indians on the plantations while relocating freed Africans in peasant type cooperative and communal villages along Guyana’s coastland.

Cheddi Jagan – in his 1964 monograph entitled “The anatomy of poverty in British Guiana” – chronicled how the colonial occupiers structured a system of exploitation of labour that kept the majority of Guyanese in constant poverty, and dependent on the plantation for daily survival.

To help them manage the plantations, colonials provided education to labourers children only insofar to satisfy the plantations and government needs for lower-level clerical workers. Such acquisition of education allowed some to gain limited economic success.

Over the years, the system of plantation and village existence evolved into gradations of poverty in which those with higher incomes and savings improved their living conditions while the majority continued lives of subsistence existence. It is this creation of poverty that the governments of independent Guyana inherited.

To date, in its efforts to develop the country, the PPP/C government has taken steps to address the problem of poverty through various initiatives.

Focusing on improving education, the PPP/C Government built schools, training institutes, and established university campuses, with intent on producing well qualified and trained candidates for workforce participation.

Through the establishment of health centres and clinics in various parts of the country, the government has demonstrated its commitment to improve the health and wellbeing of citizens that will enable them to lead productive lives.

By increasing retirement and old-age benefits, the government has helped in alleviating the trappings of dire poverty among the elderly sector of the Guyanese population.

By restructuring the sugar plantations and decreasing the dependency on strenuous manual labour through increasing mechanization, the government is better postured to provide living-wages to improve the daily lives of plantation labourers.

The distribution of government land has assisted many in building their own homes, and establishing small farms that serve in improving the quality of life.

The above, coupled with regional infrastructural development such as roads, bridges, and drainage, along with the establishment of recreational and civic centres, the PPP/C government has made inroads in its efforts to address the problem of poverty.

While intent on addressing Guyana’s problem of poverty, the PPP/C government is saddled with the latent aspects of the subculture of persistent poverty. Like potholes on a highly traversed highway that keep on emerging even after being patched, and expanded when not attended to in a timely fashion, poverty refuse to disappear.

Let’s look at a few examples. Many of today’s University graduates and individuals with technical education still seek to migrate to the U.S, Canada, and other countries in search of quick economic success. Many skilled and unskilled labourers with relatives abroad also look forward to migrating, and when sponsored, some cease working altogether even though it may take years for the approval of their immigrant status. Legal and illegal migration continues to bleed the country of qualified and skilled personnel. In addition, repatriates with their newfound wealth and retirement benefits, residing in their former villages and communities have widened the economic distances between themselves, neighbours, and even family members. These are but a few examples of salient yet overlooked or ignored aspects of the reproduction of poverty.

While the discovery and production of oil has created hope for economic success in the minds of many, the dividends accrued takes times. When coupled with investments in internal development which also takes time, the PPP/C government becomes doubly pressed to carefully plan and implement projects across regions to bring greater benefits to residents.

Ill-conceived development projects can lead to failures that contribute to the enlargement of poverty enclaves. These enclaves, in turn, are susceptible to the cultivation, and harbouring of deviants and criminals who commit acts of terror against the public. These enclaves are also sources of political exploitation in the promotion of divisiveness, unrest, and societal instability.

Hence, in travelling the fast-paced highway to economic development, the PPP/C government cannot afford to overlook, or cease in addressing the potholes of poverty which can only be minimized, but not easily eradicated. Even as it continues to address this societal problem, many would be quick to attack the PPP/C government as being responsible for creating the existence of poverty. Customarily, such opponents deliberately ignore the fact that Guyana came into existence over centuries of production and reproduction of persistent poverty.

Until such time when the government can afford to provide economic relief to the qualified poor, the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots will continue to be problematic, and serve as fodder for opposition forces in their false claims and propaganda campaigns.

Narayan Persaud, PhD

Professor Emeritus

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• Emeritus, Narayan Persaud, PhD, policy, Professor

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