Edited Address by Brigadier (rtd) David Granger, Leader, to the 18th Biennial Delegates’ Congress of the People’s National Congress Reform at Congress Place, Sophia, Georgetown on July 25, 2014.
The PNC is an integral part of APNU. We will together continue to fulfil our obligation to the nation both through the legislative process in the National Assembly and in the country at large. We shall continue to work to harness the talents of a broader constituency, to foster the conditions for social cooperation, to deepen the democratic process and to develop the economy.
The PNCR and the future of Guyana
The Party must continuously review its policies in order to enable it to respond to the demands of the changing social, political and economic environment.
The PNC, while in government, reconstructed the coastal roads network and its sea defences; constructed the Soesdyke-Linden highway, bridges on the Canje and Demerara rivers, the international airport at Timehri and the Mahaica-Mahaicony-Abary agricultural development scheme, the University of Guyana and Cyril Potter College of Education, the multilateral schools, hinterland schools for indigenous students. It embarked on rural electrification, household pure water supply and other infrastructural projects. The PNC pioneered huge working people’s housing schemes, the Amerindian lands rectification process, free education as an entitlement and equal recognition of religious observances.
We have established the Burnham Education Scholarship Trust – BEST – an NGO to assist children from all regions to offset expenses throughout secondary school.
The Party will continue to work towards promoting inclusionary democracy within A Partnership for National Unity (APNU).
Human development crisis
Guyana is facing a human development crisis as a result of the PPP/C’s chronic maladministration. Public protests have become the visible and voluble expressions of resistance against the PPP/C’s mismanagement of public health, public security, public works and public schools. Guyana, in the new millennium, has become more unsafe and more unstable than ever before. A few people enjoy an extremely high income and most people endure an extremely small income. Four out of ten Guyanese are classified as poor. Three are considered to be extremely poor.
Guyana, according to the UNDP Human Develop-ment Report 2014 – Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience –has been ranked 121st out of 187 countries. The cost-of-living has increased three-fold under the PPP/C regime.
Guyana is a corrupt country. The Transparency International Corruption Perception Index 2013, ranked us 136th out of 177 countries – 121 places behind Barbados. Growth is hampered by extensive corruption and lack of economic and employment opportunities.
The nation’s population, according to preliminary results from the Report on the Guyana Population and Housing Census 2012 is now reckoned to be 747,884 – a decline of 3,339 from the 751,223 recorded for 2002 when the previous census was conducted.
Census results show, among other things, a significant drop in the number of persons living in the East Berbice-Corentyne Region (No.6). This is a region which the PPP/C used to consider its ‘stronghold.’ But it is also a region where human safety has been seriously affected by contraband smuggling, murder, armed robbery, suicide and piracy. The Region’s population decline was mainly influenced by ‘emigration.’
The US Embassy in Georgetown confirmed the ‘emigration’ trend.
The Embassy reported that, during the last decade it issued 46,540 immigration visas to Guyanese. The Embassy, therefore, has been issuing an average of 4,500 immigrant visas per year since 2004. It reported that 4,572 were issued in 2013 alone, a rate of more than one visa every two hours from this little nation. The flight of Guyanese to neighbouring countries – the Caribbean, Brazil, Venezuela and Suriname – has reinforced the causal connection between crime and emigration.
The economic crisis has lowered workers’ standard of living. Protests, strikes and stoppages by the country’s largest trade unions – the Guyana Public Service Union and the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union – have demonstrated how much labour relations between the state and its workers have degenerated.
The World Bank, in its 2014 World Development Report, rated Guyana as the second poorest country in CARICOM.
Guyana’s international competitiveness has been impaired because of the lack of major investment in public infrastructure.
The PPP/C’s administration simply does not furnish the funds to confront the most serious challenges facing families. These are:
– the quality of education at the primary and secondary levels along the coastland and in the hinterland as well as at the University of Guyana;
– the unavailability of jobs for young school-leavers everywhere;
– the daily threats to human safety while there are three armed robberies every day, two murders every week and 12 fatal accidents every month; and, the threats of disease.
Unemployment is the central issue affecting young people in Guyana. The PNCR warned the PPP/C that this country is sitting on a ‘time bomb’ of youth unemployment. The government’s delay in dealing with the jobs crisis and its disregard for measures to defuse it can detonate a social explosion which could have dangerous consequences.
The National Employment Report published by the International Labour Organisation estimated that, based on Guyana’s Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES), which was last undertaken over a decade ago, about 44 per cent of the population of working age are “not economically active.”
That Report also indicated that young people suffer most, owing to the fact that school-leavers are inexperienced and have a long wait before they find their first job.
The report of the Caricom Commission on Youth Development – Eye on the Future: Invest in Youth Now for the Community Tomorrow – noted, among other things, that the primary education dropout rate was “at a staggering height.”
Young people are our nation’s future but they face monumental challenges under the PPPC administration. The spate of suicides among adolescents, the rising number of teenage pregnancies, the large number of school dropouts, the unavailability of new job opportunities, the reports of their being victims of police brutality and torture and the huge prison population (of which youth are said to comprise 75 per cent) are all signs of their plight.
Young people do not want to be placed on a hinterland ‘dole.’ They want careers. They want technical and agricultural institutes in every region, not just the coastland. They want regional branches of agricultural credit and development banks.
Governance crisis
The results of the 2011 general and regional elections opened opportunities for real political, social and economic change. A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance For Change together polled 175,051 votes and the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC), 166,235 votes. These results gave the combined opposition a majority of one seat in the National Assembly.
The PPPC, rather than pursue a consensual policy of “inclusionary democracy” and cooperation with the opposition as prescribed in the Constitution, adopted a posture of confrontation. That approach, as you know, has failed.
The President’s refusal to assent to certain bills passed by the Assembly has stuck like a bone in the throat of the Opposition. The Minister of Finance’s management of the nation’s finances has been a major source of political contention. We shall soon settle that!
President Donald Ramotar took a great leap backwards at the 30th Congress of the People’s Progressive Party. His vituperative tirade was a threat to the prospect of inclusionary democracy and a menace to the project for national unity.
President Ramotar’s‘feral blast’ against the National Assembly, suggests that he has not comprehended the concept of cooperation..
The President characterised the National Assembly as “a wound on the body politic of our nation…that is festering and reopening every time a sensible, moral and costed development project is stalled because the Opposition wants to hold back progress or the cheap publicity or promoting agendas inimical to our people.”
The PPPC has been struggling to diminish the authority of the National Assembly. It has challenged the Assembly’s legitimate decisions in the High Court. It has failed to assent to bills. It has spent money that was not approved by the Assembly. It has refused to adopt and implement the Assembly’s resolutions. It has deployed the state media as a weapon to wage war against the Opposition.
Speaker of the National Assembly Raphael Trotman once had to warn the Executive of the danger of a constitutional crisis.
The PPPC has undermined local democracy for the past 20 years. It has paralysed the entire local government system and undermined the economic development of many municipalities and neighbourhoods.
The deterioration of physical infrastructure has been a visible indication of urban and rural blight. Progress has been impeded, most of all, by the PPPC’s failure to conduct local government elections under reformed legislation and thereby allow the people themselves to take decisions that affect the development of their communities.
The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development has systematically and deliberately destroyed most neighbourhood democratic councils to facilitate its total domination of the entire administrative apparatus. Grabbing absolute power was easy enough. Grasping the expertise to develop human communities and encouraging economic enterprise were much more difficult. The MLGRD’s primitivism has sucked the oxygen out of the economic life of communities.
The education crisis
The single biggest problem at the national level, with dire implications for the future, is the broken public education system. The Ministry of Education reports that nearly 7,000 children drop out of our primary and secondary schools every year. The PNCR, as part of an APNU-led government of national unity, will usher in unprecedented opportunities for our youth. The opportunity for young students to be educated as engineers to build bridges and roads to open our vast hinterland and to develop schemes to exploit our hydro-electrical potential; the opportunity for geologists to develop our bauxite, diamond, gold, manganese and quarrying resources; the opportunity for biologists, botanists, zoologists and agriculturists to expand food production; the opportunity to improve communication and human learning; the opportunity for manufacturers, shippers, builders to drive our economy forward at a faster rate.
These opportunities will not be fully exploited and this country cannot be developed by chance or by conjecture. They cannot be achieved by the woefully impoverished, the ignorant or the illiterate. They cannot be achieved while so many primary school children cannot qualify to enter secondary school or when thousands of children drop out of our primary and secondary schools every year.
The atrocious results at the essential annual National Grade Six Assessment examinations are evidence of a diseased and disordered system.
The hinterland crisis
The hinterland comprises over three-quarters of this country’s territory. Long unwatched land borders with Brazil, Venezuela and Suriname; vast unpatrolled open spaces; unmonitored airstrips and numberless rivers have become corridors for illegal narcotics and firearms. Some mined-out parts have degenerated into a mosquito-infested wasteland. Its evergreen forests and pristine waterways are under threat of damage and contamination. Its people are poor. The hinterland’s mining, logging and tourism resources have been exploited for over a century and continue to enrich the national treasury, but their physical infrastructure is inadequate for such vast territory. Its small, scattered population is vulnerable to criminal violence, human trafficking and environmental hazard and must bear the burden of a high cost of living.
The PNCR supports the prudent exploitation of our mineral and other natural resources. We will ensure, however, that the livelihood of the residents is sustained, that the environment is protected and a new approach to hinterland administration is introduced.
There have been over 2050 murders in Guyana from January 2000 to May 2014. The annual rate continues to climb. The United States Department of State Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) report on Guyana stated: “Serious crime, including murder and armed robbery, are common, especially in the suburban areas and the interior regions.”
The most recent information from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime lists Guyana’s 2010 homicide rate as 18.4 per 100,000 people – the fourth highest murder rate in South America behind Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. Narco-trafficking is the engine that is driving this country’s high rates of execution-murders, armed robberies, money-laundering and gun-running. Violent crime is scaring foreign investors, driving away the educated élite, undermining economic growth and impeding social development.
The lucrative narco-trade has spawned criminal cartels. Drug lords have been able to deploy their fortunes to purchase political influence in order to protect their interests. Money-launderers also distort the domestic economy by pricing their goods and services below market rates which undermine legitimate businesses.
Revelations in the international media of a Guyana-Italy cocaine conspiracy are ominous. The PPP/C administration deliberately avoids references to the high rate of armed robberies, contraband-smuggling, gun-running, money-laundering, murder, narcotics-trafficking, people-trafficking, piracy and banditry plaguing the country.
Social protection crisis
Poverty can be reduced and, perhaps, eventually eradicated, with good governance and sensible public policies. The PPPC no longer mentions Guyana’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper– PRSP –even as a footnote. The PRSP was meant to be a mechanism through which Guyana could have crafted its own plan for poverty reduction and could provide a guideline for the World Bank to render assistance. The PPPC seems to have abandoned the poor and embraced the notion of two nations – one rich, one poor.
The National Insurance Scheme
The story of the NIS is one of a dream degenerating into dread. The scheme began operations in September 1969 under the PNC administration. Prime Minister Forbes Burnham had a clear vision of a welfare state which stood on three pillars – free education from the nursery to the university, affordable housing and social protection through the creation of a national insurance scheme which would afford coverage “from the cradle to the grave.”
The NIS under the PPPC faces a plethora of problems. The biggest is the failure of PPPC representatives who have dominated the NIS board for the past two decades to respond to changing socio-economic conditions. The scheme’s long-term financial sustainability has been recklessly endangered. Political interests rather than prudential considerations seem to have driven NIS’s investments during the last decade. They ended up compromising the quality of the investment portfolio.
Citizens deserve better social insurance. The scheme is in deficit. The 8th Actuarial Review in December 2011 declared that it was approaching “crisis stage” and predicted that, unless reforms were implemented immediately, it would be exhausted in less than 10 years.
Strong trade unions and a united labour movement are essential for social security, a fairer society, effective governance and national development. Our ‘One Nation’ approach, rather than generating social conflict, can contribute to improving productivity, strengthening democracy, reducing poverty and enhancing the quality of life of the population.
The PPPC-administered primary health care system is failing women, children and the aged. This failure has been most evident in hinterland and rural areas. All Guyanese should have access to good health care. Primary health care should be seen as an investment in human development.
A united nation ought to be one in which cooperation prevails over confrontation and national integration over communal disintegration.
The PPPC has become Guyana’s political troglodyte. It seems unable or unwilling to change its political posture in order to positively influence economic change and restore the sustainability of social policies.
Such a change, inevitably, must be based on a recognition of the authority and autonomy of the National Assembly.
There must be respectful relations between the executive and legislative branches of government and reverence for the institutions of the state. The PPPC has demonstrated that, on its own, it is incapable of solving the country’s current crises.
The PNCR’s ‘One Nation’ approach could be the main means of combining the talents of a wider constituency and of creating the conditions for social cooperation and economic progress..
Our One Nation project shows how our policy programme, once we return to government, will be relevant to people’s everyday experiences and expectations. Our resilient and resourceful people and communities are eager to play their part in rebuilding our country as One Nation.
The PNCR understands that the building blocks of One Nation include not only new policies but also a continuous process of party reform. Our Party, therefore, is continually renewing itself within the Partnership as a movement to give a voice to people from every part of the country and every part of our great diaspora.
The big question facing Congress today is this: “…are you happy living in Guyana today?
Are you happy living in a divided country?
Are you happy living in a backward country?
Are you happy living in a corrupt country?
Are you happy living in a narco-country?
Are you happy living in a PPP one-party state?
If the answer is no let us fight the PPP not one another. Let us keep the pressure up to push the PPP out of office, elect a government of national unity.
May God bless you. May God bless the PNCR. May God bless Guyana!