Dear Editor,
Mr. Ravi Dev’s letter, in response to my letter questioning the correctness of his position that the opposition is stuck in the past, further demonstrates my point that it is Dev who is stuck in the past. His letter was published in both the Stabroek News and Kaieteur News under captions: “It is up to the PNC to make its politics moderate and accommodating to attract outside voters” and “What, if not peaceful politics” respectively. Instead of taking the opportunity to advance the discourse by sticking to the pertinent issues I raised, Dev’s choice was to take cover by invoking, devoid of its political context, my past articulations, “African Guyanese Armed Resistance” and “ Riot Act”. His other motive for doing so is to support and protect the PPP’s racial/political domination aligned with corruption which is now a worry to the US/UK and their allies.
For the record, Editor, I reiterate, that if the PPP government resorted to its previous policy of state-sponsored killings of Africans and an armed resistance emerges, my position will be similar to that of the period he refers. I have in the past said, and I repeat, I will support resistance be it unarmed or armed once it is a response by the poor and powerless of any racial group/ community against state-sponsored killings and political oppression, irrespective of the government in power. This is the bottom line of my politics on this matter and has remained unchanged. May I also remind Dev that I developed this position long before the PPP returned to power in 1992. Dev is well aware but ignores this fact. Why? I also emphasise that I never saw the PPP’s policy of state-sponsored killing of Africans as the inevitable consequence of our winner take all governance system. I saw it as a deliberate political choice of that party and government at the time the PPP came to power in 1992, a choice surprisingly made by the Dr. Cheddi Jagan led government.
Dev, in his recollections of the past never dealt honestly and directly with the appalling levels of corruption in the PPP led governments since 1992, but especially under the administrations of President Jagdeo et al. The APNU+AFC coalition governed under the same governance system but took a different political course. Having digressed, I return to the issue I raised on Dev’s position, devoid of empirical evidence to support his contention, that the opposition is stuck in the past in seeing elections as an ethnic census. In a normal country, my observations would have resulted in scrutiny to determine their accuracy. I repeat that Dev, in placing the claim that our elections are an ethnic census at the foot of PNC/APNU+AFC is flawed. I chose to engage Dev on his general pronouncements, not simply to expose shortcomings in his advocacy, but to push for a new discussion of our present national challenges in the context of my call for us to have a new beginning.
More importantly, my letter ended with an appeal to the African and Indian leadership and their respective thinkers to move beyond elections and to recognize our new realities in the context of oil/gas wealth and the threat of new arrivals (the influx of foraging nationals) to the nation. Dev’s response is to return to the past. I now address his position that new arrivals be seen not as a threat but as an opportunity to change our electoral behaviour by seeking to win them over. Interestingly, Dev is putting the future of the nation into the hands of the new arrivals rather than the Guyanese people. He abandons working for a constitutional political solution to end winner take all politics with its inevitable economic and social exclusion and is now advocating electoral adventurism based on new arrivals.
Disappointingly, Dev has embraced and glorified the PPP’s policy to use its control of the state machinery to distribute the country’s wealth in a partisan and illegal manner by converting the national purse as PPP money.
This abomination, the cornerstone of the so-called “PPP inroads to opposition areas”, is glorified by Dev as progressive politics by that party – at a time when the
government/state is deliberately carrying out a policy of expending state resources for its partisan political advantage, thereby making a mockery of good governance and democracy. Why should the opposition not push back? And this, for Dev, is evidence that the opposition is stuck in its old ways? I end this response by making the point that it is obvious we have not arrived at a point in Guyana where we can have that much-needed conversation about what constitutes “One Guyana”.
Sincerely,
Tacuma Ogunseye
