Dear Editor,
I refer to Mr. Ravi Dev’s letter published on Sunday, September 18th 2022 edition of the Stabroek News captioned, “LAPOP survey suggests vast majority of Guyanese want a strong leader handing out bread.” Dev was selective in the data he extracted from the LAPOP survey, and the interpretations he offered failed to tell the whole truth. But more importantly, his continual refusal to come to grips with the reality of what led to the African Armed Resistance is not surprising. Nor is his placing the burden of Burnham’s rule exclusively on the support of the African community- in the process leaving out the resources and political capital offered to Burnham by the Indian business class.
Dev wrote, “The PNC and Forbes Burnham got a free pass from their African Guyanese supporters to rig elections and rule with an iron fist from 1968 to 1992”. The question I pose would it be more accurate to contend that Burnham got a free pass also from the US and its Western allies? He continued, “Free and fair elections in 1992 might have introduced democracy under the PPP but not stability since even though the economic situation was improved for all groups (as shown by internationally supervised empirical surveys) ethnically directed violence was unleashed by the PNC and African Freedom Fighters up to 2008.” The PNC can speak for itself, Resistance Fighters are either dead or incarcerated or underground and hence cannot offer an objection to Dev’s rewrite of history. It is uncontested public knowledge that the resistance came into being in response to state and drug-sponsored killings of young African men. Dev’s silence on this fact is remarkable, to say the least.
Now the LAPOP survey. I would not contest the findings of the survey that suggested that most Guyanese would prefer a “strong leader” in the government, even if the leader bends the rules to get things done (as clearly evident during the presidency of Bharrat Jagdeo). Many Africans, as well as informed observers locally and internationally, including the US and its Western allies, took the above-stated position on the Burnham government. So, I concur. Where I part company with Dev is his simple interpretation of the data that states 41% of African Guyanese answered, “very good and good” to the question: “how well is President Ali doing?” But the survey was conducted a year ago. In political terms, the greater part of that year constituted the “honeymoon” period for the government.
The results cited are therefore not surprising.
Since then, African- Guyanese and other constituencies have seen the PPP returning to its true colours. Even its 2020 US and Western allies have addressed the present reality. Only by ignoring this part of the political equation, as Dev has done portraying the 41% approval of President Ali in 2021 as sustainable to benefit the PPP. The poll was conducted during a period when the country was dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and in the absence of normal/active street politics. Added to this was the all-powerful ABC (America, Britain, and Canada) and CARICOM pressure on the country to move on. Dev in support of his thesis wrote, “In the year since the poll, the PPP has intensified its developmental program and direct material infusions into the communities – while projecting a strong President Ali. Meanwhile, the APNU/AFC Opposition has countered this by claiming that the PPP is favouring the Indian Guyanese community, and is in the process of constructing an “apartheid state” in Guyana.”
Dev is well aware that he is propagandizing since he knows the dialectic, or to put it another way, the other side of the equation. Dev’s playbook almost always involves creatively assigning blame to one ethnic group. The issue of a strong leader handing out bread also places human needs exclusively on “bread” and not on “justice” and dignity. By inserting and high-lighting this argument in the way he did Dev is reducing African, Indian and Amerindian needs to sheer want. In so far as African Guyanese are concerned, Dev’s argument is supporting the cynical playbook of the PPP regime in selectively making minimum resources available to African–Guyanese on the basis that doing so allows them to bypass the national responsibility of fair negotiation through African-Guyanese political and social leaders.
I conclude by saying that Dev is stretching the tape by suggesting that the LAPOP survey contradicted the claim that the PPP is in the process of constructing an “apartheid state” in Guyana. If the LAPOP survey is conducted today in the African community the results will be sharply different from that of 2021.
Sincerely,
Tacuma Ogunseye
