Dear Editor,
Regarding a letter written by Dr. David Hinds in SN dated March 4, 2019, and captioned `We have been in a permanent state of constitutional crisis since 1953’, I looked for a solution in this missive but there was none to be found. His missive comes across as offering an excuse for the bully actions from the PNC-led Coalition today.
What Dr. Hinds is not telling the nation is that all sides have suffered because the human social development in Guyana has been extremely uneven over the years. More so under the undemocratic Burnham regime and now clear for all to see, under Mr. Granger. He chooses to not assign the word evil to these periods but was quick to assign that word to the PPP rule. That position is most unhelpful since it lacks honesty and integrity. All of our people are suffering from actions taken by all sides, Dr. Hinds and there may be shades of evil in all camps.
In this letter Editor, I am paying particular emphasis from a strictly economic viewpoint rather than the political viewpoint because politics has never put bread on the people’s table. While there is a myth being peddled by some social commentators that Indo-Guyanese are wealthy, when one disaggregates the facts, the evidence paints a very different picture. This fallacy has fueled a PNC-led strategy of racial supremacy designed to reward mainly the friends and family and party members from the PNC with the top jobs, contracts, and other state benefits. These PNC policies continue to get buttressed by people like Dr. Hinds as we can see in this letter of his where he can only assign evil to the PPP in the fourth paragraph. He sees nothing wrong with the PNC-led coalition employing 85% of the newly hired heads of department from one group and 16 of the 17 permanent secretaries from the same group. Such racist actions by a government are not evil in Dr. Hinds’ books. It is people like Dr. Hinds who continue to do the most harm to Guyana by continuing to provide academic cover for the misguided policy of this ethnically supremacist PNC led Government who has done very little to economically empower all since May 2015.
No one will dispute the fact that the majority of the top 200 richest families in Guyana are Indo-Guyanese families. But they are not an accurate representation of the demographic framework of the nation. Guyana has some 72,000 Indo-Guyanese families, so by no stretch of any imagination can 200 families constitute the majority. Actually, the latest poverty statistics reveal that some 22,000 Indo-Guyanese families do live in poverty compared to 15,000 Afro-Guyanese families and 9,000 Amerindian families. So clearly the Constitution, the Judiciary, the several Executive Governments have not worked for these people at the bottom of the economic barrel. But what is clear is that since Team Granger came to power some 3,000 more Indo-Guyanese families have slipped into poverty especially on the sugar estates and therefore all this academic gibberish from Dr. Hinds illustrates that we are not committed to the solutions but rather prefer to kick the bucket down the road by meddling with the problem using academic cover.
This PNC-led Government has enough time to implement Constitutional reform that would provide a solution to this nation of minorities but chooses not to act. So how can the PPP be blamed for this?
The PNC had their chance to fix Guyana constitutionally and they deliberately chose ethnic supremacy as their tool of rule rather than a model that socially, economically and politically empowered all. That is inexcusable. Time for a change is here again and the PNC, unfortunately, has now lost that moral right to the hot seat. Delaying the inevitable will just make their chances at the next polls less good, every day after March 21, 2019.
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh
