Dear Editor,
I have been involved in Guyanese politics since the age of 16. In all that time, I have abided by the principle, so perfectly articulated by the great African scholar and freedom fighter, Amilcar Cabral. Cabral instructed us to: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” By now, surely all Guyanese must have realized that the last five years of APNU+AFC governance, and their bizarre and embarrassing behavior following the March 2020 elections, has changed Guyana’s political landscape once and for all. Maybe I am being too optimistic. However, I hope and pray that since the two major political parties have had their opportunity to govern this country, Guyanese, of all races, will wake up and see that the major contradiction is between the exploiters and the exploited, the oppressors and the oppressed, the “haves” and “have-nots”. For OVP, it is about Guyanese of every race, who toil 40-60 hours and more a week, and still cannot adequately care for their families. They are the working poor, who wait longingly for every pay-day, knowing that before the next pay-day, they and their children will be back to tennis roll and tea. It is about those who hustle every day to eke out a living in dilapidated markets and on the pave, without proper amenities and the respect due to these vendors who are business men and women. It is about those who are forced to beg for a living, including so many of our elders. This is a terrible injustice, no matter what the race of those who are suffering this way, especially in a country that is one of the most resource rich on the earth, and with a population of way less than a million people. As leader of OVP, in the run-up to the 2015 elections, I warned Guyanese in a newspaper advertisement, that even if APNU+AFC was elected, the struggle for economic justice and true independence will continue. I said, they, like their predecessors, would be dictated to by foreign capital and external powers. A simple truth is before us! It is not only evident in Guyana, it is evident worldwide. No political party, no matter who they claim to represent, can deliver this country from its present condition, once they strictly adhere to the neo-liberal model. Although we have always known this to be true, we are, nonetheless, an organization of the people. The people wanted the PPP out in 2015. Not only Africans, but a significant number of Indians wanted to give APNU+AFC a chance. Because of this decision by the people, we offered critical support to the Coalition and ran only at the regional level.
For years, as leader of OVP, I have spoken out against the garrison politics that divides and ruins this country. Guyana’s development has been arrested for years by race-based politics, which allows Africans on the one hand to blindly follow the PNCR, and Indians to follow the PPP in the same way. Guyana can never move forward unless and until we move beyond this absurd binary. History moves in both evolutionary and revolutionary ways. In the case of Guyana, the people had to see the truth for themselves. There were many people who believed that the APNU+AFC government was the answer to their prayers. When they first came to power in 2015, their supporters were crying out in the streets, “thank you Jesus” and “David and Moses will deliver us”. It has been a painful process watching the debacle of the last five years, culminating in the tragic events that followed the March 2020 elections. If anything positive can come out of it, it will be that Guyanese of all races will finally realize that we must judge a government not on their race, but on their policies and actions, which of course, must include their anti-racist policies. If Guyanese have reached that point, then we would have reached a level of political maturity where we, the people, can take a giant leap forward. While we remain locked into the abyss of race-based politics, hamstrung between parties, large and small, all of whom slavishly adhere to the discredited neo-liberal agenda, Guyana will remain as it is today. Even as oil flows, the gap between rich and poor will simply widen. We congratulate President Ali on his decision to kick out the two principals of the rogue foreign company, Superior Concrete. For too long, foreign capital and their local minions have been running riot in this country. They have flouted the laws with impunity, including those that are in place to protect Guyanese workers and our environment. OVP urges President Ali and his government to reign in the local business men and women that facilitated this rogue company. We advocate that this approach be consistently applied across the board, to all corporate predators and plunderers, including ExxonMobil. Guyana has a class of business people that constitute a socio-economic category known as the “comprador bourgeoisie”. According to Serbian radical sociologist. Ljubisa Mitrovic, “this upper layer of the bourgeois class, posits its own interests over the general social ones….it is not national in character and is socially irresponsible. It is a blind servant of foreign capital, ruthless in the exploitation of the domestic workforce and dictatorial in relation to its fellow countrymen”. Those with eyes to see can identify these people in our midst. They constitute the 1% that own and control the wealth of this nation, believing that Guyana is their private property and that we are still on a plantation. They must not be allowed to operate above the law of this land.
In addition, we must congratulate President Ali and his government on the issuing of 22,000 scholarships for all Guyanese. This is an excellent move, because Guyanese of all races are in dire need of education and upskilling if they are to take their rightful place in the future development of our nation. Unfortunately, the bitter truth is that we are witnessing the political elite of the PNCR attempt to psychologically manipulate African-Guyanese to our detriment. A clear example is that is some quarters, Africans have been told not to take the “PPP scholarships”. This is narrow and petty politics; it is anti-national and unpatriotic. It shows that they are actually willing to deprive African-Guyanese of this opportunity, even while their children are attending prestigious universities abroad, a number of them having been awarded scholarships while APNU was in office. The scholarships on offer are not “PPP scholarships”, they are scholarships issued by the Government of Guyana. I urge all African-Guyanese, once they fulfill the necessary criteria, to apply immediately and take advantage of this opportunity. If we do not, then clearly we will be further marginalized, not because of the PPP, but because of our own mis-leaders. I can assure you personally that President Ali and his government are genuinely trying their best to offer these scholarships to Guyanese of every ethnic background. If this was not the case, you can be sure that OVP would be among the very first to denounce such discrimination. As patriots, whose main objective is to see our nation and its citizens prosper, we are not in the business of picking a fight for the sake of it. We have no axe to grind. We are fiercely independent. Let it be known, if any grave injustice raises its ugly head anywhere, under any regime, you can be sure that myself and our organization will be at the forefront of resisting that injustice as we have done for so many years. As I write this letter, news has been posted that the Minister of Education, Priya Manikchand, is talking about abolishing the draconian National Grade 6 exam and making every school a “good school”. This is something that OVP has called for since our inception (see Common Entrance primarily designed to maintain status-quo built on social and economic elitism, SN, 4/7/17). Such a move would go a long way to breaking down the social elitism that prevents all Guyanese from enjoying an equal opportunity to reach their full potential. Both APNU+AFC and PPP/C must know that African Guyanese are no longer willing to be used as pawns in a game, and we hope that our fellow Indian Guyanese will also not allow themselves to be manipulated along race lines, and will join us in freeing this nation from the garrison politics that has arrested our development for too long. OVP will support any initiatives, by any government that benefit our country and its people of every ethnic background. Likewise, we will firmly resist any agenda that seeks to perpetuate the exploitation and oppression of the masses of our people. We believe in a politics that is ethical, principled and transformational, and will never be imprisoned by garrison politics, regardless of who promotes this backward and obsolete thinking. I say to all Guyanese, of every ethnicity and mix, if the last five years have shown us anything, surely it is that we need to move beyond race-based politricks, recognize that the fundamental contradiction in our society is between the “have and the have-nots”, regardless of their ethnicity, and begin to exercise our right to decide who will govern this nation on the basis of their policies and actions.
Sincerely,
Gerald A. Perreira
Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)