The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) is urging Guyanese not to lose sight of the fundamental lack accountability in Guyana’s political system, which it blames for the failure to ensure “rights-based” development.
In its message to mark International Human Rights Day, which was observed yesterday, the GHRA said there has been a failure over the past five decades to create accountable governance.
“An unaccountable government during the first half of that period suppressed the rights of Guyanese citizens by bizarre political experiments and curtailed freedoms by misguided ideology,” it said
“The second half of the period… has resulted in a division of people into those-not necessarily Guyanese- accumulating enormous wealth and the majority of citizens whose economic and social rights have been shredded by the steady disintegration of public and welfare services; low-paying jobs stripped of trade union protection; deteriorating maternal and child services; appalling levels of violence against women; public health hazard levels of uncollected garbage, high levels of personal insecurity, homophobia, and stigma towards people living with HIV,” it added.
The association said the country’s “winner-take-all, unaccountable politics” has always been vulnerable to those in power using their position to accumulate personal wealth.
It stated that these inefficiencies are compounded by unregulated economics, which has led to a situation in which governing Guyana can be likened to running a large corporation, devoid of any legal and accounting constraints.
It argued that the purpose of politics in Guyana has been skewed to the extent that is has become an avenue to create alliances with private sector elements prepared to operate on the margins of the law, cooperate in deals to attract investment from shady sources, create duty-free concessions, remove fiscal disincentives, accept extensive tax evasion, furnish work permits to unskilled labour, permit importation of a wide range of defective, substandard consumer goods, including foodstuffs, with little or no control with respect to public health or safety standards.
The GHRA added that manifestations of government mismanagement are also seen in the operations of the Office of the President (OP), whose employees enjoy salaries, revealed by the Minister of Finance to parliament to be massive, even by private sector standards, while institutions created to benefit lower-income citizens such as the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and the New Building Society (NBS) are manipulated by OP officials as if they were subsidiaries.
It classified the absorption of the Privatization Unit into government holding company NICIL, under the chairmanship of the Finance Minister, as the single clearest example of both running the state as a private corporation and the lack of accountability by government to its electorate. “This unconstitutional maneuver allows the government access to proceeds accumulated from the sale of public and state assets by the Privatization Unit, along with whatever other funds they choose to accumulate there, in order to invest and speculate like a private company without effective parliamentary oversight,” it said.
The group also said there has been a lack of environmental considerations driven by private interests. “Environmental protections are systematically over-ridden by the demands of private accumulation: uncontrolled exploitation of gold and bauxite is creating devastating habits, sacrificing fresh waterways in Amerindian areas and the fresh air in bauxite communities. This negative effect creates immediate profit for private investors and long term costs for Guyanese tax-payers are overlooked. Not only are the Guyanese denied the benefits of those natural resources themselves, but they are forced to assume a substantial part of the costs of production by others.
Every foreign investor, it should be borne in mind, is investing here, not because it is cheaper to produce in Guyana, but because of the costs of production can be off-loaded onto Guyanese in the form of lower wages, no taxes, hazardous working conditions and thrashing the environment, than is the case in the investor’s country of origin. The scale of illegal and unregulated mining and forestry products makes a mockery of the notion that they are a ‘national’ resource,” it added.
At the same time, the GHRA said, the country’s performance as a society finds it rooted near the bottom of all Caribbean social and economic indicators of progress and development and near the top of indicators for crime, insecurity, illegal migrants, drug trafficking and corruption.
It added that while Guyana has a range of institutions which superficially suggest that it is a rights-conscious society, including the four constitutional rights commissions dealing with children, indigenous, women, and human rights, none possesses a single legal power to enforce rights.
As a result, the GHRA called on Guyanese to keep in mind the lack of accountability in the political system, while emphasising the need to reassert citizenship that distinguishes between “public and private realms” and demands accountability in political life. “The importance of International Human Rights Day lies in reminding us that human rights provide a pathway for securing human flourishing, as well as a guide for assessing how well were are progressing along the pathway,” it added.
