Clarence Frederick Ellis, CCH, former Chairman of the State Planning Secretariat and Supernumerary Deputy Governor of the Bank of Guyana, died on April 17, aged 80.
Clarence Ellis was an eminent economist and public servant who specialized in economic statistics. Soon after he graduated from the London School of Economics in 1967 and joined the Bank of Guyana as a senior economist, however, he faced the greatest challenge of his life as the economy experienced its most egregious changes. For a decade and a half, Ellis was a witness to an exhaustive experiment in socialism and statism that put his talent to the test.
At the height of his public career from 1978 to 1982, Clarence Ellis served concurrently as Chairman of the State Planning Secretariat and Supernumerary Deputy Governor of the Bank of Guyana. He was, arguably, one of the most important decision-makers in monetary and national financial administration. In these positions, he left a legacy of sedulous planning and sound economic policies. He had a phenomenal capacity for hard work, often toiling well beyond the call of duty and sometimes through the night. His commitment was never questioned.
Ellis’s worldview was profoundly influenced by the New World Group which had emerged in the early 1960s. Made up mainly of Caribbean academics, economists, political scientists and sociologists – among whom were scholars such as George Beckford, Lloyd Best, Havelock Brewster, Norman Girvan, Maurice Odle and Clive Thomas – the group theorised and philosophised about post-colonial development issues.
Their notions and catchwords about ‘screwdriver industries,’ the ‘plantation economy’ and ‘industrialisation by invitation’ dominated the discourse about the transformation of the anglophone Caribbean. Some members of the group advocated the nationalization or control of the commanding heights of local economies. After the restlessness of the late 1960s, several Caribbean states attempted to embark on social reform and economic restructuring.
The Guyana government announced its decision to nationalise the Demerara Bauxite Company in 1970. It consulted several economists of the New World Group, contracted Norman Girvan as a technical expert and received the endorsement of a group of thirteen UWI academics who stated that “it provided the opportunity for the Caribbean people to mobilise their resources for improving welfare and promoting economic development.” A series of similar nationalisations followed.
Ellis, born and bred in Queenstown Village, was no socialist but was sympathetic to some post-colonial changes. His own ideological instincts and interests were conservative. He was not an intransigent or impatient man and, as a development economist, was committed to poverty alleviation and local democracy rather than radical root-and-branch reform.
He joined the cadre of public servants – including Donald Augustin and William D’Andrade – who, under the leadership of Dr Kenneth King, Minister of Economic Development in the PNC administration, drafted the Second Development Plan, 1972-1976. Remembered best by its slogan to “feed, clothe and house” the nation, the plan was expected to create employment opportunities, generate equal distribution of incomes and encourage the equitable geographic distribution of economic activities. It did not.
Despite his abiding affection for the century-old but faltering village councils, Ellis supported the replacement of the appointed colonial epoch district commissioners by democratically elected representatives. He saw such a moderate change as a way to strengthen regional administration and as an instrument for the production and distribution of goods and services to the people.
Ellis also played a key role as adviser to Mr Gavin Kennard, Minister of Agriculture in the PNC administration, who led the Government of Guyana’s negotiating team for the acquisition of the assets of Jessels Securities Limited in 1975 and of Booker Bros, McConnell & Co, in 1976.
As Chairman of the State Planning Secretariat, Ellis wielded the authority for drafting the annual Budget during the years 1979 to 1982. He re-designed the format for the estimates to include the entire non-financial public sector, promoted the use of computers and instituted the system of the quarterly monitoring of the financial operations of the non-financial public sector.
By the start of the 1980s, however, Ellis was faced with a huge balance of payments crisis characterised by a ballooning current account deficit. It was clear that the grand initiatives of the 1970s had collapsed and the economy was in recession. The Second Development Plan of which Ellis and the administration had such high hopes had been abandoned. The nationalised industries, after a promising start, had begun to falter. Labour unrest and work stoppages increased and political protest was growing.
The Government of Guyana had been obliged to seek an agreement with the International Monetary Fund in 1978. The Fund’s conditionalities included the usual formula – reduction of government expenditure, wage restraint, progressive elimination of subsidies and increased prices for utility services such as electricity, telecommunications and transport. As a result of these austere measures, political resistance spread, labour productivity fell and the economic crisis worsened.
By the first half of 1980, Guyana stopped paying its full commitment to external creditors. Its arrears to the International Monetary Fund and the Caribbean Multilateral Clearing Facility were the most serious default. Although the country received a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank in March 1981, the economy continued to deteriorate. Structural adjustment programmes proposed by the Fund and World Bank in those early days took little account of the impact on society. Riots had erupted in other countries and, inevitably, it was perceived that the severity of the measures would ignite a social conflagration.
Ellis worked overtime, playing a critical role as Guyana’s representative in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. He travelled widely as a member of delegations seeking bilateral negotiations with several friendly countries. Success was elusive. President Forbes Burnham tried to extricate the country from the economic quagmire by seeking assistance from petroleum-producing countries – Iraq, Libya and Kuwait – but these initiatives failed.
It was at this point in 1982 that Clarence Ellis left Guyana. He headed for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he spent eighteen months studying in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He spent the next four years working for the International Monetary Fund as Research Adviser to the Governor of the then newly-formed Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. He was then appointed Alternate Executive Director on the Executive Board of the World Bank where he represented eleven Caribbean Community countries. Subsequently, he was appointed to a similar position at the Inter-American Development Bank.
Meanwhile, political change had come to Georgetown in October 1992. The PNC was swept from office and a PPP administration was elected. At the request of the Guyana government in 1993, Ellis’s appointment was terminated by the governments of the Caribbean Community. He worked irregularly as a consultant for the Secretariats of the Caribbean Community, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States and the Caribbean Centre for Monetary Studies but he realised that his professional career had all but come to an end.
Ellis settled in Bowie, Maryland where he came to be regarded as the dean of the Guyana diaspora in the metropolitan area. Free from formal employment as a public servant or consultant, he cultivated a formidable reputation as a speaker at conferences and as a writer of letters to the editor in the daily newspapers. Always an erudite and perceptive analyst, his letters had two themes – economic policy and ethnic empowerment. His pugnacious, polemical style seemed to be aimed, particularly, at the policies of the People’s Progressive Party administration. But he criticised the policies of the leaders of the People’s National Congress – Desmond Hoyte and Robert Corbin – when he felt they were misguided. In his earlier days, he fearlessly criticised Forbes Burnham as well.
In one of his letters, only last year, he admitted that on the occasion of the expulsion of Forbes Burnham from the PPP in 1955 “I, among many other Africans, wrote Mrs Jagan, expressing our support for Dr Jagan. I received a response from Mrs Jagan asking my permission to publish my letter in Thunder… She responded to me to say that she had a much better article from Sydney King [Eusi Kwayana] which she preferred to use.”
Ellis became an advocate of the theory of “shared governance,” pouring forth his opinions about its efficacy as a remedy for Guyana’s political malaise. He saw racial disrespect and discrimination as the major stumbling blocks to governance and wrote persuasively of the need to resolve the ethnic question as a pre-condition for social and economic progress. He elucidated his theory of governance that involved a compact not only of political parties but also of non-governmental organizations, the business community, civil society and labour unions.
His beliefs in political democracy were inseparable from those on ethnic security. He supported the education programme of the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa by conducting free lessons in the 1970s. He also supported the African Cultural Development Association in helping to define the association’s thrust for shared governance in the 1990s.
Clarence Frederick Ellis was born on September 7, 1929, the eldest of ten children of Samuel and Elsie Ellis, in Queenstown Village, in what is now the Pomeroon-Supenaaam Region. He attended the St Bartholomew’s Anglican School from which he won a Government County Scholarship to attend Queen’s College in Georgetown in September 1941. At Queen’s, he was among a group of outstanding scholars – including Bertram Collins, Rashleigh Jackson, Kenneth King, Brynmor Pollard and Frederick Wills – who were to become prominent public servants in laying the governmental foundation for the post-Independence state.
Ellis left Queen’s in 1946 without completing the London University Higher Certificate in order to start working as a primary school teacher to support his siblings. He qualified as a First Class teacher after 3 years, was promoted to the level of Senior Assistant Teacher after 11 years and acted as Deputy Headmaster after 12 years.
He was then able to enrol in the University of Leicester where he studied Economics and Economic Statistics and, after graduating with a Bachelor of Science (Economics) degree, spent a short period of time with the British Civil Service as an assistant statistician. He later attended the London School of Economics from which he graduated with a Master’s Degree in Economics. Ellis undertook advanced studies in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA in 1982 where the focus of his study and research was the economics of developing countries.
Clarence Ellis was well regarded by his peers and his opinions were valued by his superiors. He received the national award of the Cacique’s Crown of Honour in 1980 for his public service.
He married Imogene Patricia, née Moore, in 1966 but she died in 1999.Their four children and two stepchildren survive him.
