Dear Editor,
In admonishing Dr. Clive Thomas and the Working People’s Alliance on the issue of cash transfers to the poorer sectors of our society, Junior Minister of Finance, and leader of the Justice for All Party, Jaipaul Sharma, said that the “previous PPP/C government mismanaged our country’s natural resources and allowed foreign institutions and forces to misguide and manipulate our economic policies and programme by adopting foreign ideologies”. First of all, Jaipaul Sharma should be bold enough to identify those “foreign institutions and forces” by name, as well as the “foreign ideologies”, and secondly, be honest enough to admit that his own governing coalition APNU+AFC is doing exactly the same thing. The foreign institutions and forces he refers to are the ABC countries and foreign corporations and the foreign ideology is of course neo-liberal capitalism.
The Organization for the Victory of the People supports cash transfers to the people as part of a larger programme of economic empowerment and democratization of the economy. However, we know that economic justice on this scale can never become a reality under the current neo-colonial arrangement that imprisons this government, as it did the previous one. Truth is, both the PPP and APNU+AFC governments, controlled and manipulated as they are by external forces and foreign ideologies, are unable to do anything but betray the people of Guyana which is exactly what both have done. The people of Guyana have given both governing bodies a fair chance and are waking up to the fact that neither can deliver what the people want and need, precisely because they are not in control and not able to act in the best interests of their own people. Everything has its time. Once the people decide that these parties are over – they are over, and that time is near. The victory of the people is inevitable.
Yours faithfully,
Gerald A. Perreira
Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)
