Dear Editor,
Kindly permit me space to respond to a piece that Dr. David Hinds wrote in Caribbean News Now on 10 May 2011.
Guyana is a strange land with an even stranger political culture. In the 1960s, the British gave us an electoral system with a strange feature-Proportional Representation (PR). David Hinds proposes to give Guyanese an even stranger creation-Disproportional Representation (DR). Under his scheme, he and his coterie “want power-the ability to determine “who gets, what, when and how.” Mr. Hinds recognizes that his group does not have support; so for him Democracy “cannot mean mere numbers.”
He wants “the power of decision making” because he believes that this is his “birthright”. So he dreams up an intellectually bankrupt paradigm that he calls “substantive democracy” that he refers delusionally to as a “higher form of democracy.” His faulty paradigm is predicated on an oxymoronic concept he calls “the fundamental human right of each ethnic group”. A fundamental human right belongs to the individual and not “an ethnic group”. The rights of the individual are antithetical to the group. Dr. Hinds’ model is internally inconsistent because this nonsensical construct is designed to give a minority power that is disproportionally greater than its representation -that is -Disproportional Representation (DR). He believes that his paradigm makes sense because his “political activism is located in a broader multi-racial praxis.”
Please educate us what is this “multi-racial praxis” that you write of. Mr. Hinds your activism is located in a tradition called the “subversion of democracy” That is, you and your coterie want to dictate “who gets what, when and how” The Guyanese people call that kind of behaviour “wrong and strong.”
Yours faithfully,
Roger Ally
Fort Lauderdale, FL
