Dear Editor,
Mr John Da Silva states in a recent letter that Dr Prem Misir has proven that claims of African marginalisation are unfounded.
Indeed, if one were to look at the range of statistics employed by Dr Misir one would conclude that the claims are weak. Dr Misir has given a list of house lots distributed and shown that blacks and Indians get a fair statistical representation as beneficiaries.
He has shown that there are more blacks in top government positions than would support claims of discrimination in job allotment. How they got there and when and by what process of seniority based promotion remains undisclosed and undiscussed as far as I know.
The problem here is that Dr Misir’s statistics need to be taken in context. For example, how does his party’s claims against the PNC stand up against the facts of the PNC’s distribution of rice lands, houses (when Sugar Industry Labour Welfare programmes and the regularisation of Indian owned squatting areas are considered), forestry resour-ces, permits of all sorts and so on.
Isolated from comparative analysis and other professional ways of looking at statistics the Misir methodology serves both to insist on the importance of measurement and to emphasise how the PPP failed to support its own claims against the PNC by using figures.
We have to be careful with figures;
The late Ronald Waddell and others backed up their claim that the PPP was killing young black men by citing the numbers gunned down by the forces of the law. The argument failed to take into account the fact that the PNC rule saw a similar policy of unjustified and extra judicial killings in which blacks were overwhelmingly the victim.
Rakesh Rampersaud has written about the possibility of the PNC being sympathetic or an active instigator in the kick down the door crime wave that saw Indians as the main targets. Mr. Rampersaud fails to confront the fact that the forces of the law started a counter campaign of violent and summary elimination of criminal suspects at around that time. Much of the state violence was an effort to stamp out this kind of kick down the door crime. Mr. Hoyte is said to have favoured the recommencement of judicial execution as a response to this crime.
There is a great deal of stupidity that is written here all the time, like the claims about balancing the armed forces, another old PPP canard that ROAR took up. But as Mr Jagdeo said on the East Coast, Indians are not responding to the party invitations to join up.
Besides the cultural thing and what must certainly have been factors such as marital status and height requirements when they were more stringent, the fact that any institution can only recruit at a rate determined by retirement of members of the existing corps and other factors of attrition need to be considered. The alternative would have been to create an Indian contingent.
My problem with Dr Prem Misir is that the statistics have to be contextualised. Statistics as propaganda is an old political ploy. But the fact is that even without the statistics, both the major races will continue to see themselves as victim of the malignant “other” with whom they are forced to co-exist. This may be sociology or cultural anthropology as Kean Gibson points out. The statistical results of persistent racism as a phenomenon will reveal imbalance of all sorts.
Let us hear from Dr Misir on the award of contracts, for example.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
