(This is my presentation to the National Conversation on Ethnic Relations 14th & 15th December, 2020)
Chairperson, members of the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC), ladies and gentlemen. I thank the ERC for inviting me to make this presentation on the challenges it faces and the way forward, for I am one of those who strongly supported it as an institution that could help to significantly bridge Guyana’s ethnic/racial divide. However, in the two decades of its existence, the efforts by the ERC and others have not had a notable positive impact on ethnic relations and a case can be made that the situation has become worse.
So how and why did we arrive at this point? What are the challenges the ERC must overcome and how should it proceed? I will argue that the ERC is caught in a context of permanent ethnic political affirmation about which it could do nothing and so its performance will continue to be extremely suboptimal. The history of Guyana can provide a snapshot of this relationship and the pathway open to the ERC.
