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Burnham’s dream of self-sufficiency ended in insufficiency
(Kaieteur News) – There is a particular species of political nostalgia that thrives in countries with short memories. It takes yesterday’s failures, dusts them with the language of national purpose, places them beneath a portrait of the departed leader and calls the result a vision.
This is what is happening today when we are invited to believe that Forbes Burnham’s dream of a self-sufficient Guyana is still being built. It is as though the intervening decades since his death were merely an unfortunate interruption in an otherwise triumphant national project.
It is a charming proposition. But history is rarely so charitable.
Burnham certainly possessed a vision. He understood, as did many post-colonial leaders, that political independence without economic capacity could become little more than the changing of the flag above the same colonial warehouse. “Feed, Clothe and House the Nation” had the ring of national emancipation. Guyana was to grow its own food, develop its own industries, train its own people and use its resources for its own advancement.
The trouble began when the rhetoric encountered reality.
Self-reliance is not the same thing as self-sufficiency, and neither is achieved by presidential speeches, state corporations or slogans painted on billboards and exercise books. A country becomes self-reliant by becoming productive, competitive and institutionally competent. It must produce things that people want, at prices they can afford, in quantities sufficient to matter.
Burnham’s Guyana instead embarked upon an extraordinary experiment in making the State the answer to almost every economic question. The state became farmer, manufacturer, merchant, importer, employer, banker, landlord and, on occasion, dispenser of ideological instruction. The private sector was regarded with suspicion, foreign capital with anxiety, and the market as though it were a disease requiring quarantine.
The result was not self-sufficiency but insufficiency.
There were shortages. There were queues. There were empty shelves. And ingenious Guyanese discovered that a society can become remarkably inventive when deprived of ordinary necessities. The country that was supposed to feed itself could hardly guarantee three straight meals for families. Factories that were supposed to become manufacturing hubs suddenly flat-lined for want of foreign exchange to procure spare parts and inputs.
The country that proclaimed economic independence eventually found itself borrowing, being plagued by blackouts and hobbled by shortages. This is the inconvenient part of the Burnham legacy that nostalgia prefers to forget.
Burnham wanted Guyana to make better use of its land, forests, minerals and people. Certainly. But the question is not whether the aspiration was admirable. The question is whether the economic system established to achieve it worked.
The deepest irony is that the resurrection of Burnham’s dream comes at precisely the moment when Guyana’s oil wealth makes it possible to expose the difference between self-sufficiency and prosperity.
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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Brilliant writing from personal observation.
Take a bow Peeping Tom.
All these Catchphrase and Political Slogan are just broad symbolic rhetoric. Very few grow wings or has the required soil underneath to sprout “physicality”
Many catchphrases are designed to evoke emotion or unity rather than outline realistic, step-by-step governance plans.
or the significant Funding and resources which are often elusively unavailable once in Office.
And Then the BIG ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, no one ever thinks of the Ruling Law of Duality that operates in our World in all Human and Non-HUMAN affairs.
Brilliant insightful writing Peeping Tom.
Victor19