Say what you like about Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, they and thus their governments had holistic and audacious views of Guyana and its development. Of course, this way of doing politics was not their invention; for the most part they were merely falling in line in an era of grand theories of social change. Some like to refer to this time, and particularly this distinct way of doing politics in it, as utopian. After all, the Soviet Union, rooted in the utopianism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Lenin adopted the title of his book for his much more popular ‘What is to be done?’), one of the boldest of the political projects of that era, ended in rubble!
Yet, Burnham and Jagan’s various levels of utopianism offered a panegyric view of man and his possibilities. Jagan’s helped to cultivate a concern for the poor that could be quite daunting to mortals concerned with acquiring and keeping the good life. Perhaps that is why we should not be too hard on his successors. Forbes Burnham’s view of creating the modern Guyanese person, able to confidently help to develop the national and international environments, cannot fail to impress.
Put aside the inconsistencies contained in the theories themselves, the efforts of our founding political fathers could only have emerged from the cauldron of our distinct and most problematical political environment and this contributed significantly to distorting their intent and made them harmful to large swathes of our population.
But when confronted with what we have had since – Desmond Hoyte’s focused efforts to pull Guyana out of its dire economic straits and Janet Jagan and Bharrat Jagdeo’s surreptitious attempt to create political space by establishing political dominance – the human mind cries out for an imaginative end game against which it can, even if tenuously, pitch its efforts.
Believe it or not, it was my detection of the absence of a coherent vision underlying the construction of the most recent budget that drove me to this kind of intellectual nostalgia, which some would argue would best be left to political history and philosophy.
Maybe it is still too young, but it must be said that, outside of vague expectations of a lucrative hydrocarbon future, the present regime has so far not projected a visionary direction.
On the contrary, it appears to be stumbling from pillar to post: dubiously naming and renaming of everything in sight; increasing the cost of governance by, among other things, significantly increasing the number of ministries and giving massive salary increases to the governance elite; portraying a lax approach to important commitments such as national unity and constitutional reform, and doing opportunistic contortions on important principles of politics and governance. It appears that the regime has already fallen into the mould of not caring what the opposition or the people think or it is bent upon providing opportunities for its opponent to chastise it.
For instance, from the moment in July 2015, when Minister Joe Harmon, attempting to justify the regime’s huge and controversial pay increase to itself, claimed that he paid his junior more than a current minister got, anyone associated with the political process must have known that here was a ‘god-send’ the PPP/C could not fail to exploit. This regime came to office portraying the leadership of the PPP/C as criminally corrupt and deserving to be behind bars. That party would not, therefore, fail to take any and every opportunity to highlight every perceived corrupt act on the part of new regime and its leaders.
Taxation is the central pillar of the political system and without some form of it human society will cease to exist. That is why in some jurisdictions, such as the United States of America, the ‘tax man’ is hated more than the police. Our populace has long been aware that many self-employed persons avoid paying taxes. The professions, particularly legal and medical, are generally thought to be at the forefront of the tax dodgers, so when Minister Harmon (one of several lawyers in the cabinet) made the above mentioned statement and many of his colleagues followed him in a similar vein, they provided the PPP/C with an opportunity that it took by way of a motion calling upon all ministers and parliamentarians to declare the taxes they paid over the last ten years.
Notwithstanding its resort to legality and claimed concerns about privacy, one would have thought that many of those now in government who have been attacking other people as corrupt have been associated with politics long enough to have put themselves in order so as not to be embarrassed and seen as hypocrites on this matter. That apparently was not the case and the regime found itself in a hard place. Rather than taking the opportunity the motion offered to lead by example, it had only one way out, and it voted down that aspect of the motion that dealt with the exposure of tax records.
Mr. Harmon might have erred somewhat and the government might have been bruised, but there the matter should have rested. Not so, as lo and behold, on the cusp of local government elections and a lengthy budget debate, in his budget presentation Minister Winston Jordan opened up the matter all over again by waxing lyrically about his intention to improve the efficiency of the tax administration, particularly focusing on the self-employed.
It would be a miracle if the PPP/C let this pass either in parliament or at the political hustings that will follow. How could this have passed the general process of internal political discourse? As I said, it is as if the regime cannot read the tea leaves or that it simply does not care what the people think.
While platitudes abound, the present budget, like most of its forerunners, appears without moorings and isolated as if on an island by itself! Not without some merit (for example, I must join those who welcome the government’s return to collective bargaining in the public service, with the hope that the next round of negotiations will be completed with greater dispatch), it has, however, not left one with even a half-certainty of where it wishes to take us. What is this development it is promising? Sure, some words like ‘greening’ were tossed around but without any grounding.
It need not have been so: for example, in this era when apocryphal predictions associated with climate change are combating an almost chronic materialism, Guyana’s own contribution (from Hoyte though Jagan and Jagdeo) to this discourse provides a marvellous platform for the regime to have presented to the nation a salient vision of what Guyana and Guyanese can meaningfully contribute to the world if we hold hands and assiduously work for the common good.
