While the WPA respects the struggles for better oil contracts and other related issues, the party says it situates itself in the struggle for the Guyanese people to benefit directly from the oil revenues.
In a statement on Monday to mark the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Working People’s Alliance (WPA) Leader Dr Walter Rodney, the party said its stance is driven by both its Emancipation and Independence promises to lift the poor and powerless out of the damaging cycle of poverty.
“We can never be a truly independent and democratic country if we do not break the back of institutional poverty. WPA, therefore, recommits its energies to the ideals of the Buxton Proposal. Our struggle for a Universal Basic Income and for Cash Transfers to households remains at the top of our agenda in the coming period. In our view, the reduction of poverty is one of the greatest gifts we can give to Walter Rodney to ourselves as a nation”, the party said.
The party said that it joined the Rodney family and associates in remembering the contributions of Rodney to Guyana, the Caribbean, Africa and the wider world. His contributions, says the WPA, were enormous and wide-ranging, and resonates four decades after his life was ended by a Guyana government and state that had descended to the lowest depths of dictatorship and autocracy.
The WPA says it remembers with pride the six years Rodney spent in its ranks and described that period as one of bravery, heroism and intense resistance against the rapid deterioration of our Independence covenant. But it was simultaneously “a period in which we demonstrated to Guyanese that we could co-exist as a nation regardless of our social and ethno-racial differences.’ Rodney and the WPA, says the release, gave Guyana both a blueprint for confronting dictatorship and an example of what a truly liberated Guyana could look like.
The WPA said it salutes the thousands of Guyanese, dead and alive, who answered Rodney’s call for People’s Power in the face of dictatorship –they were and are true patriots of freedom who did not betray Rodney on the frontlines when he needed them most. Describing the 1992 elections as ‘victory of People’s Power over dictatorship’, the party says the outcome of that elections was replete with the fingerprints and footprints of Walter Rodney. The real heroes of the 1992 moment, says the WPA, were the fighters who fought alongside Rodney and who continued the struggle after he was removed.
The party argued that ‘out of the ashes of the dictatorial state that was overcome by the struggles and example of Rodney and the WPA, and the movement it spawned, came the criminalized state that took root under the PPP (1992-2015).
Rodney’s resistance it said “… was against the obscenity of dictatorship in all its forms regardless of race and party.” Whilst Rodney could not, in 1980, anticipate an oil-producing Guyana—the statement said that he grappled with some of the dynamics that now accompany the Oil and Gas era. From geopolitical machinations to dictatorial governance to ethnic fracturing and dominance to persistent poverty.
The struggle for bread and justice resonates today as it did five decades ago, the statement said, adding that the WPA is recommitting ‘its energies to the ideals of the Buxton Proposal as enunciated by Profession Clive Thomas It is against this background, the release noted, that the WPA calls for a broad anti-dictatorial movement similar to the one built in the Rodney era. Such a movement should be multi-party, multi-racial and multi-class. WPA is prepared to help build that movement.
