GOVERNMENT and the opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP), are at odds over what took place at the December 16 encounter beween Dr. Cheddi Jagan and President Desmond Hoyte and the flak is beginning to fly.
The state information agency, GPCA, asserts Jagan pressed Mr. Hoyte into pushing for a communist state here but the PPP leader says this is untrue.
Reporting on the meeting GPCA claimed, while he could not deny, and indeed accept, the urgent need for overseas investment in Guyana, Dr. Jagan at the same time expressed fears about the inflow of foreign capital. He was worried, he said, that the government’s policy of attracting foreign investment could prevent Guyana from becoming a communist state.’
GPCA says Jagan urged that this objective be pursued even if it took a hundred years and claims the veteran politician ‘was very much obsessed with his Marxist/Leninist ideology and expounded at length about what he perceived to be its desirable benefits.’
Jagan however, denies this and charges it is ‘a total fabrication intended no doubt to whip up anti-communist hysteria against the PPP.
‘I never said anything about a communist state or Marxist/Leninist ideology.’
According to Jagan, GPCA Head, Mr. Kit Nascimento, is ‘flip-flopping once again to a vicious anti-communist, anti-Marxist position.’ He accused Nascimento, as Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s office in 1973-79, of defending the PNC’s doctrine of paramountcy and the position that its ideas were based on Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Jagan feels the pinning of the communist tag on him was related to the developments in Eastern Europe. ‘No doubt it is being put forward, why support the PPP? It is communist and therefore will not be able to help in this country as communists have failed to help in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Hoyte asked Jagan for the meeting to brief him on government’s investment initiatives in sugar and bauxite and generally. The state is anxious for foreign participation again in the two key sectors and is talking with Bookers and Alcan.
Government says Guyana urgently needs new investment, mostly from overseas but Jagan, while favouring foreign capital participation, is opposed to ‘complete foreign domination through denationalisation and privatisation under a system of capitalist dependency.’ The PPP has not clarified what degree of foreign ownership it is willing to accept.
Shortage of painkilling drugs
THE Marketing Director of GPC, Mrs. Ciceley Gouveia has confirmed that there is a shortage of painkillers in the country. However, Mrs. Gouveia said that there was a limited amount of Morphine available at the Agency Division of GPC.
Sahadeo Singh, General Manager of the Agency Division says that a small amount of Morphine injection is available through the normal procedures. The necessary requests have to be made in writing by the various hospitals and certified by a doctor. Morphine injections, he said, were recently made available to the Woodlands Hospital.
Mr. Singh said that a shipment of another pain killer Pethidine was due in the country on the 23 December, on a BWIA flight. This did not arrive and apparently the shipment is stuck in Trinidad. Mr. Singh also said that another painkiller DF118 is also available.
Mr. Singh further said that these drugs are imported on a regular basis but that because painkillers are a controlled category of drugs they are usually in tight supply.
He explained that these painkillers are imported from Roche Products in Switzerland from whom the necessary permits have to be obtained. GPC can then request a certain amount and Roche Products will decide how much will be made available.
‘They were Cultural Captains of our Rainbow Tribe’
SIR SHRIDATH Ramphal has paid tribute to the late Arthur Seymour and Frank Pilgrim. In a telefax from London he recalled that Frank Pilgrim was a contemporary of his at Queen’s College and they co-edited the 1946-7 issue of the school magazine. ‘He was a loner in many ways, but he was everybody’s friend. His quiet moments were his own, but he shared his life with a wide society; and it was wide, for he threatened no one with ambition or malice or yearning for power or influence.’
Speaking of Arthur Seymour, Sir Shridath says, ‘Arthur Seymour was a special human being. He cared for people – leaving Elma to care for him. He cared to the point of being unwilling to hurt by even pressing his own view — giving primacy, as it were, to their humanity, giving others with generous spirit the benefit even of his doubts.’
Sir Shridath ends his tribute to both men with these words:
‘But there is something else that Frank Pilgrim’s and Arthur Seymour’s passing stirs in me. It is our heritage of oneness of which I tried to speak at the beginning of our Commemorations on May 5 last year. What stirs me is a sense of obligation; no, that is not strong enough a word—a sense of great indebtedness to this multi-ethnic section of our society to which Frank Pilgrim and Arthur Seymour belonged, though, in truth, it is the absence of their ‘belonging’ to any section that I hail. These ‘coloured people’, these ‘red men’ these ‘mixed breeds’, who were immunised at birth from the infection of race deserve our present tribute. They truly are freed from that inheritance of ethnicity that is such a mixed blessing.
‘Now, with the social hang-ups of colonial society a thing of the past, they are, in a sense, what we must all aspire to be — genuinely, intuitively non-racial Guyanese of many hues, a rainbow society enriched by all its colours as they merge into each other. Therein lies our hope; that the lives of Frank Pilgrim and Arthur Seymour will lead us to acknowledge that we hold our heads high as people, as Guyanese, not because of where we come from but because we are here together; not because of colour and race, but because we pooled these ancestral legacies when we became one tribe.
‘Frank Pilgrim and Arthur Seymour lived their lives and enriched our own by being cultural captains of our rainbow tribe. There is a pot of harmony for Guyana at the end of that rainbow. Our truest tribute to them, therefore, (and our best New Year’s gift to ourselves) would be to ensure that all of us can truly say — in the words of the theme song of ‘Raise Up’ – Arthur Seymour, Frank Pilgrim, IS WE’.
The funeral service for the late A.J. Seymour took place yesterday at the Trinity Methodist Church at 4.30 p.m. President Hoyte and Prime Minister Green attended. Mr. Ian McDonald delivered the eulogy.
