Dear Editor,
The British High Commissioner, Mr Wheeler, must be living in a fool’s paradise. For him to state publicly that the “politicized racial divide is hindering development in Guyana” is to either falsify history or to strike out on his own whimsical agenda.
The High Commissioner must be knowledgeable of his country’s history of resorting to the divide and rule policy in the British colonies of which British Guiana was an integral part.
The racial divide in this country did not emerge yesterday; it was imported, fostered and institutionalized by the British ever since they landed in the colonies which were eventually combined to form British Guiana.
Indeed, throughout the annals of the colony’s history up to the high points in the mid 1950s and 1960s when the communist bogey was used by their local satraps in the political and labour movement, race and class manipulated by London played a determining factor in the country’s political and economic development.
The practice of divide and rule was not only aimed at controlling the population in those days, it also was a matter of conscientization. This was a principal feature of political and social life in British Guiana under British colonial rule.
It was this political millstone around the country’s neck that held back the colony’s development thus creating the lop-sided economy which future generations inherited and which the current PPP/C administration is now seeking to re-balance with a view to transforming the economy to a modern economy.
The British High Commissioner must know that this country’s development was hindered by the manipulation of commodity prices on the world market, relegation of the colony to a primary producer of raw materials and the restriction of the key contributors for economic development to bauxite, sugar and rice.
This was compounded by the exploitation of manpower and the extraction of super profits, most of which were drained overseas. Small wonder why British Guiana was known as ‘Bookers’ Guiana’ Further, under British colonial rule the local branches of the transnational banks and insurance companies severely restricted their credit to the productive, industrial and agricultural sectors, thus perpetuating a deformed and lop-sided structure of the colonial economy.
More recently, Guyana suffered from a thirty-six per cent price cut in the price of its sugar sold to the European Union. This was compounded by the dismantling of the preferential arrangements for the ACP countries of which Guyana is an integral part. All this was consistent with the push by the industrialized countries to liberalise global trade utilizing the WTO as the main instrument to facilitate this objective.
Thus as history has demonstrated it was the lop-sided economy that was foisted on the colony and the shameful divide and rule politics that left a lasting legacy of British colonial rule in British Guiana and which contributed largely to hindering development in Guyana. The British High Commissioner should put these historical facts in his pipe and smoke them.
Yours faithfully,
Clement Rohee
