Dear Editor,
On Wednesday 23rd of March 2022, we joined with the rest of the world to ‘Celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the late Dr. Walter Rodney, March 23rd, 1942 – March 23rd, 2022’. Walter Rodney, a renowned historian and revolutionary intellectual whose ideals of Freedom from Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism Dictatorships fueled National Liberation struggles the world over along with other revolutionary intellectuals of his time – Franz Fanon, Hubert Marcus, and Regis Debray in his own country Guyana. His political activism, the need to bring Guyanese together to build a democracy in which the fundamental right of Guyanese to employment, to proper health and education being prioritized. Access to land, which is the inherent right of all Guyanese and to benefit from the extraction of our natural resources.
Walter Rodney was assassinated for these ideals which has led to the enrichment of the political elites of the PPP/C and the PNC Coalition of parties. Rodney did not live in the era of the oil/gas discoveries, the giveaway of our Canjie and Kaiteur block, and the PPP/C placing generations of Guyanese in a perpetual state of poverty, having to pay the foreign companies to exploit our resources, and in a display of political infancy, has taken to the court in defense of the big capitalist consortium, ExxonMobil, from not paying any income tax is wholly insensitive to the plight of the Guyanese Nation.
We have to take into consideration that our political impasse is due to the fact that for 70 years the substitution of the PNC with the PPP has led to the erosion of our fundamental rights that our fore-parents had gotten by way of struggle from our former colonial masters. In so long as we cannot contextualize Guyanese politics, we as a people will continue to suffer. We cannot claim to be a politically enfranchised people as long as we continue to be ruled over by a Constitution that was imposed upon us, which is fraudulent, and the processes that led to its formulation dates back to the notoriously rigged referendum of July 10th, 1978.
The hanging on to powers every day has conjured up the spirit of late LFS Burnham who is the embodiment of the 1980 Constitution. Without any shame whatsoever, they have sentenced most working-class Guyanese to die of malnutrition and starvation, while they continue to live ostentatiously, and a small segment of the business class are having a field day raising the prices of essential food items, while other countries in South, Central, and the Caribbean have taken a humanitarian approach to governance. Barbados, a small Caribbean Island, should put the oil-producing Guyana government to shame but then it doesn’t seem possible as these politicians have shown that they are prepared to crush Guyanese under their feet and give us stones rather than bread! The PPP may do what it pleases, but not as long as it pleases. As we celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the late Dr. Walter Rodney, may we recommit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that seek to drive us into silence and our children into starvation.
Sincerely,
Desmond Alli (General Secretary GUA)
