Dear Editor,
It is put to us by Hydar Ally, in a letter on the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, that the Burmese situation “ is not dissimilar to what obtained under the period of PNC dictatorial rule” (‘The release of Aung San Suu Kyi’ SN, Novermber 16).
Burma has hundreds of political prisoners and a brutal regime that has shed much blood. Comparing the PNC or any political party in the country or Caribbean to Burma is perhaps a form of self-aggrandisement. It makes you look good at having survived and vanquished such a foe. For in the narrative still being spun, the ‘Other’ has grown in demonic character and magnitude as the years go by. No one in 1990 would have taken Mr Hydar Ally seriously. But there is a generation to which the folklore and the supporting discourse must be transmitted.
The PPP has hypnotised itself into believing that it has won a struggle against a “dictatorial regime.” This kind of propaganda, mildly entertaining in its exaggeration becomes, in time, revulsive as its role in the general myth-making is discerned.
Fact is that the PNC was mildly authoritarian by international standards. Nothing more. Mr Ally and none of the retinue hanging around the Jagans ever spent time in Sibley Hall, nor, apart from the airport hassle and other irritants, were they put on show trial, sentenced, exiled, flogged, killed…
But all of the regimes that the PPP defended and wished us to imitate, the communists, had that kind of record on human rights. But for Mr Ally and the boys, no contradiction is too stark or inconsistency too glaring to plug the orifice from which this kind of propaganda is spewed.
The fact of the matter is, by the standards the PPP itself exalted, the vanguard party such as the PNC declared itself, had all rights to rule dictatorially, to declare itself ‘partie unique,’ to run the country without having to go through the pretence of elections at all. The problem with the PNC then, was not its brutality, it was its half-hearted socialism. Had it gone all the way history would have saved us the spectacle of some of the intellectual invalids that were rammed into round holes in 1992.
The PPP did not win any war with the PNC nor did it restore democracy nor did it bring back flour and dhal, etc. The PNC did all of that to itself. But somehow to do this to oneself is to claim useful achievements in a fantasised narrative that wants to leave us a feeling of victory in the final chapter.
In fact the PNC itself changed policy and brought back flour, dhal, the ballot box when international conditions made Jagan acceptable, and gave this newspaper its right to exist or Vieira to broadcast. The group of concerned placard bearers stomping the snow up North, or the bottom house militants pedalling from village to village with the latest slop contributed absolutely nothing to changing the PNC’s mind. It was the PNC changing itself since 1985 (after WPA pressure was long dampened) and paying a price in internal dissension and ultimately, its loss of office.
The epic of David and Goliath is instructive. Goliath was no dwarf. He had to be a giant. In the epic in which the PPP wraps itself the PNC, as giant, magnifies by its existence the puny contribution of the mostly by-standers in its ranks, surprised as we all were when Hoyte changed course.
Some time, somewhere, a stand has to be taken against the excremental propaganda to which we are accustomed.
Randy Persaud also permits himself to offer a falsification of our economic history in a letter replying to Maxwell in your paper under the headline ‘To say the PNC and PPP both failed equally is to disregard the evidence,’ November 12. The letter is particularly distressing because no point has been made. It seems to be propaganda for its own sake.
So, things were bad under the PNC. But things are bad under the PPP. Things will be bad under any government that succeeds this one. Unless changes in the global economy occur, or we re-engineer the local economy to change the production base, or a miracle of some sort is wrought among us. Dr Persaud succeeds in identifying some of the extraneous factors that led the PNC into the valley of post-colonial poverty, but then, somehow still daubs blame for the sorry pass to which we were brought, upon the government of the time.
He fails to explain to us how Jamaica, an economy that was developing well before independence, which had a dollar so strong it enjoyed favourable parity with the US, which featured like Guyana among the MDCs or More Developed Countries in the Caricom basket, would fall as far as we did in the same circumstances. There was no PNC in Jamaica. There was the saving element of tourism which we did not have. But we found ourselves by the mid-seventies in a similar misery. Two ex-socialist countries.
It is an annoying ignorance to try to pin on any government responsibility for the concatenation of ill luck that marks our trajectory from poor colony to poor free state. PPP did badly, by some accounts, even with the kinder debt service arrangements it inherited. But we need to look also at the effects of flood, political instability and other factors if we are to judge them. These factors ought to be assigned a quantitative value so we can judge their impact on overall performance. In all good sense the PNC years have to be similarly evaluated.
The PPP was pretending that it would magically improve things once it got back in power. It was either purposely fooling people, self-deluded or practising a philosophy of ‘positive thinking.’ The PPP could not and will not work any miracles in Guyana. Nor will a PNC if it returns to office. Nor will any one else. The problems are beyond the solution chanted on the hustings or the rum-shop diagnostics we got in the past.
The lie that you needed a party card to get a job under the PNC, etc, is part of the toxic obloquy the PPP has thrown about it for some time .One is surprised at the total lack of embarrassment with which it is still flung. When will this demeaning ignorance stop?
I see that Jagdeo sued for being accused of racism. The PPP was, for generations, accusing others of the same thing. With no verifiable proof. Throwing accusations about became part of the modus operandi of our politicians, who, let truth be told, were often no more than a string of square pegs with little ability to understand the phenomena which which they were faced. It was the level at which, intellectually, they were most comfortable. Dr Persaud boasts, in a gesture of throwing confetti at Jagdeo one supposes, that the PPP will be remembered for its environmental work. In fact, if we were to look at legacy and record, the record of the PNC is unmatchable. That party, in more difficult circumstances, helped remake the world out of a colonial order. There was Lome, a re-invigorated Commonwealth, Caricom, etc
Dr Jagan ought to be remembered here. Like it or not, at a philosophical level, the two major contenders – PPP and PNC – had much in common and many differences, but if the PNC’s greatest error was going socialist with all that it had come to mean, the PPP had no problem with this. The idea that we would sell our sugar to Russia at a favoured price, suggested as a way to getting away from cyclical capitalist crises, has its limits. The Cuban collapse is a lesson.
What Drs Randy Persaud, Prem Misir and the others should usefully do in order to be understood, is to explain exactly what it is the PPP would have done differently in the sixties and seventies. Recital about dhal and flour is useless.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
