Dear Editor,
Henry B Jeffrey has come up with a bogus analysis of my letter dated January 6, 2020 in Stabroek News, with his logic defying response in Stabroek News on January 8, 2020. Dr. Jeffrey pulls five straw men in his fallacy; three from war-torn countries, namely Lebanon, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Cyprus, then compares ANUG to Switzerland and also informs us that “Belgium is governed by 15 ministers divided equally” between French-speaking and Dutch-speaking communities. The new Guyanese fad of coming up with new ways to divide seems to have afflicted the Doctor’s mind.
His analysis briefly starts in Switzerland with some inaccuracies, then moves on to such “benchmark democracies” as Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Belgium and finishes his “lightheaded” venture in the Republic of Cyprus.
Dr. Jeffrey’s mental gyrations and hair-splitting attempts to reconcile institutional racism with good governance amounts to time wasted. Speaking with a Belgian colleague of mine after reading the letter written by Henry; my colleague noted that “Belgium is a bit of a mess politically. The country is divided into four regions plus the Federal government. Each region has its own parliament and are divided by language, supposedly all the government agencies and services to the public are bilingual.”
The point here is that the supposed models of paradise that Dr. Jeffrey references, are mostly countries in serious political turmoil and are invariably of no relevance to building cohesive political institutions and governance systems in Guyana.
I encourage Dr. Jeffrey to do a thoughtful analysis closer to home. Trinidad and Tobago will make for a much more useful comparative analysis on race and governance, without far-flung mental globe-trotting and using countries that have little in common with Guyana.
I recommend Percy Hintzen’s book, The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad for reading or rereading to rationalize his thinking on governance of societies similar to Guyana.
If my Stabroek News published letter dated January 5, 2020; is interpreted by Jeffrey as “laced with unwarranted moral invectives”, it was not intentional. However, this racist and rotten system that is being propagated in Guyana for far too long, not by ANUG, Change Guyana or any of the new parties, deserves condemnation, not personal attacks. The denial of civil and human rights will have a miserable end and we should resist such a racist system with great effort. Let us have a governance system at the political party level and Government level that unites Guyanese and creates the synergies that will allow for dynamic progress and prosperity.
There is a speech by Dr. Walter Rodney on YouTube captioned: Walter Rodney – Race and Class in Guyanese Politics at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9szjOu-yIPs that I often listen to and one of the many quotes from his speech that I find inspiring is: “Where do you want to go and where are we going, in some senses even irrespective of our will, because of processes operating in these said countries and if it is that you don’t find a model of a society that suits you at the present moment, that is not an argument against the ongoing processes of change, because one does not have to have a model of the idea realized before one says that it is realizable.” I do hope Dr. Jeffrey is inspired by Walter Rodney to believe that Guyanese can have a model of governance that is not based on racial division and restriction of human rights.
We have to aspire towards an Inclusive Political Culture that unites our country.
Yours faithfully,
Nigel Hinds
