Dear Editor,
I am led by M Ali’s letter in your issue of Nov 21, under the caption ‘Is the highway between Linden and Lethem feasible?‘ to ponder, from my rustication in Lethem, on two of the meanings of the Guyanese vernacular expression “lick-up.”
The primary meaning is that, whether the road is feasible or not, whatever public money is spent on it will give such opportunities for corrupt diversion into private pockets as to be a temptation to those who will decide how much and whose financing to accept. This is a lesson forced on us by long and painful history, as in many parts of the world. The secondary meaning is that some small portion of benefit must trickle down to the Rupununi population, whether by labour on the project itself or by the easing of local transportation, and we shall be glad to lick the platter clean of whatever we can get, incidental to the larger issues to which we will never be allowed to contribute.
These meditations overshadow from the Region 9 perspective any objective analysis of this project. Mr Ali, who I surmise is a civil engineer, has barely touched on a few of the operative issues. Tonnage serving current or super-optimistic projections of productive capacity (all carbon-positive) or market in Regions 8 and 9 provides no justification for the investment. The pre-feasibility and the feasibility study done in the last 5 years were based on providing an outlet for Brazilian manufactures to the Atlantic coast. The Brazilian interest in financing, after too many hesitations on the part of the Guyana Government, has switched to an actual commitment with Suriname, competitive claims of the Venezuelan route notwithstanding.
Part of our delay must have been due to an awareness of the Brazilian policy of living frontiers, practised these hundred years to peaceably acquire territory and influence from several of her neighbouring nations. Indeed we may rely on Venezuela and the United States to help guard the nominal integrity of our southern border, but those friends have not our own consciousness of a string of small Guyanese communities where Brazilian language and money predominate in daily life; where indeed a significant proportion of the electorate qualify to vote in Brazilian elections, which they do because it is compulsory, to maintain entitlement to social benefits extended in strategic Brazilian states. So poverty alleviation unaffordable in a neighbouring country can become an instrument of diplomacy sufficiently far-seeing.
It may be ironic at this time that Brazil’s policy towards the grass-roots of Region 9 is more humanitarian in effect than that of our own governance, current or aspiring. On this view Rupununians may be content to remain isolated, thrown upon our own resources and upon the prospect of extracting a little profit from whatever Georgetown sees fit to do about a road which can be a dubious benefit in any case. Local knowledge and views are never consulted anyway; the periodic handouts that buy the balancing power of our votes serve only to confirm us in our syndrome of dependency, never respecting our potential contribution through equal participation. Not that the infrastructural investment essential for serious development could be justified by any government on only a 5-year timescale, except as now for aspirational and rhetorical statements, and in the hope, perhaps, of further access to other people’s money.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided)
