Dear Editor,
My attention was drawn to an invitation to the public by an organization describing itself as ‘’The Cuffy 250 Committee,’’ to a forum to be held on Sunday August 21, 2022, via many social media platforms. The invitation informs that it is the ‘’9th annual forum on the state of African Guyanese.’’ Invitees are requested to discuss ‘’Resisting the Emerging Apartheid State.’’ The invitation publishes the photographs of several persons under the adjectival label of ‘’distinguished speakers.’’ One of those persons has publicly proclaimed that his photograph was used unauthorisedly and requested that his name be removed from the invitation. In a letter to the Chairman of this organization, he made these very seminal observations: ‘’I completely reject the phrase ‘resisting the emerging apartheid state’ to describe conditions in Guyana. In my view, this statement is a disservice to all Guyanese, as such I wish to categorically dissociate myself from it. More importantly, I am a firm supporter of His Excellency, the President of Guyana and I am absolutely convinced that it is not part of the President’s agenda to create any disparity based on race.’’
This gentleman rejects the hypothesis upon which this engagement invites discussion as flawed and falsified. With those sentiments, I am in complete agreement. Apart from the patent falsehood inherent in the theme, I am of the considered view that the entire discussion likely to ensue would be proscribed not only by the ordinary laws of Guyana but by the supreme law, the Constitution.
‘’Apartheid’’ is defined by the New Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘’A policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race.’’ Historically, this phrase is used to describe a one-time government policy in South Africa. To even insinuate that such a policy or system is emerging in Guyana is absolutely outrageous. The State of Guyana by Article 149 of the Constitution, guarantees protection to every citizen against discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, religion etc. The State of Guyana has signed and ratified every major international treaty in this hemisphere which outlaws racial and ethnic discrimination. Many of these treaties form part of the Fourth Schedule of the Guyana Constitution. Article 154 of that Constitution binds the Executive, the Legislature, the Judiciary and all organs and agencies of Government to respect and uphold those rights. Further, Article 160 A (1) states: ‘’All persons, institutions and political parties are prohibited from taking any action or advancing, disseminating or communicating any idea which may result in racial or ethnic division among the people.’’
No doubt the sponsors of this event will invoke their Constitutional right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 146 of the Constitution. But I hasten to remind them of the crucial exclusionary appendage expressed in Article 146 (3) of that very constitutional provision which guarantees freedom of expression. It reads thus:
146 (3) ‘’Freedom of expression in this article does not relate to hate speeches or other expressions, in whatever forms, capable of exciting hostility or ill-will against any person or class of persons.’’
Guyana’s constitution establishes a broad-based Ethnic Relations Commission to which the citizenry can complain against racial, ethnic, and other forms of discrimination. That Commission has a wide plenitude of powers to investigate those complaints and to take remedial actions. No other Caribbean constitution boasts such a Commission. It is for these reasons that the Guyana Constitution was hailed, recently, as one of the most advanced Constitutions in the Caribbean by the President of the Caribbean Court of Justice.
To this matrix one must add that Guyana is one of the few territories in the English-speaking Caribbean that has established a Constitutional Court. This Court allows for the speedy hearing and determination of constitutional and public law matters. I feel compelled to add to this configuration, the Racial Hostilities Act, which long title reads: ‘’An Act to make provision for preventing conduct tending to excite hostility or ill will against persons by reason of their race.’’ There are many other pieces of legislation on the statute books of Guyana which outlaw racial and ethnic discrimination of every form and manner.
‘Distinguished speakers’
It is not without significance that almost all of the international treaties referred to above were executed under successive PPP/C Governments; it was a PPP/C Government under whose stewardship the 1980 Constitution was amended to insert every one of the references to the Constitution made above; it was under a PPP/C Government that the Constitutional Court was established, and the Racial Hostilities Act enacted.
No doubt, there is no system to which these speakers will be able to point within the constitutional and legal architecture of the State, or Government that will be supportive of their fallacious theme. Neither is there a singular policy of State or Government to which they can advert to aid their perfidious hypothesis. For indeed if they were, rather than rant on a social media platform, why not take decisive actions by challenging those racially odious systems or policies before the Courts or international tribunals? Notwithstand-ing however, that will not restrain them from propagating, without any verifiable empirical data, outpourings of alleged racism in an attempt to imbue their audience with a misplaced sense of victimhood and to toxify minds with racist vitriol so as to appeal to base instincts and excite raw hostilities.
One of the listed ‘distinguished speakers’ served in four successive PPP/C Governments, from 1992 to 2008, holding various significant ministerial portfolios, including, Health, Education, Labour, Housing and Foreign Trade and Inter-national Cooperation. Was he part of a government that practiced apartheid? I suppose he will say no and may argue that the PPP only begun to practice apartheid after his protracted ministerial sojourn ended!
I recognized the photograph of a young Attorney-at-law conferred with the revered title of ‘Esquire’, as a speaker. He is a graduate of the University of Guyana and a product of the Hugh Wooding Law School. He may or may not know the history of the educational opportunity that he enjoyed. It was under a PPP/C Government that the Bachelor of Laws programme was brought for the first time to the University of Guyana in the early 90’s. Subsequent PPP/C Governments had to fight tooth and nail with the Council of Legal Education of the West Indies not only to get that programme recognized by the Council for admission to its Regional Law Schools but also to guarantee automatic entry to twenty-five graduands annually. The truth is that this young man is incapable of appreciating that in an apartheid system based upon race, where Afro Guyanese are victims, he could not have benefitted from such a programme from which he graduated in 2015. For that matter, he would also not have been the beneficiary of a GOAL scholarship programme of which he is a recipient for the year 2022, to study law in the UK.
Dr. Walter Rodney
There is yet another person slated to speak who was part of the last Government but who will be unable to point to a singular thing that he did for Afro Guyanese while in Government. On the contrary, he would not disclose that he secured for himself huge swathes of river front lands in various areas of the country, while his Government not only repossessed rice lands from Afro Guyanese farmers in West Coast Berbice granted to them by a PPP/C Government but reduced a PPP/C Government created Ministry of Housing to a department within the Ministry of Communities. He will not disclose to his audience that it was the PPP/C, out of Government (2015-2920) that fought and won back those lands for the Afro Guyanese rice farmers in the courts while his government in office, stoutly defended the cases and even appealed when they lost. He will also omit to disclose that the PPP/C Government distributed more house lots in 2021 in Region 10 than his Government did for five (5) years (2015-2020).
I recognize two leaders of the now defunct Working People’s Alliance (WPA) scheduled to speak. Neither had any qualms sitting in Government with a political party whose founder leader was held responsible by a Commission of Inquiry for the assassination of the most respected and iconic Afro Guyanese scholar, Dr. Walter Rodney. One of them anointed himself as a representative of Buxton and Afro Guyanese, generally. But again, he will be unable to point to a single initiative with which he can associate that the APNU+AFC did to empower the people of Buxton or Afro Guyanese, generally.
The leader of the PNC and another long-standing leader of the PNC are listed as distinguished speakers. However, they will never disclose to their audience that after twenty-eight years of political dictatorship and mismanagement of government by the PNC, they pauperized over 95% of Afro Guyanese. Though they were not leading lights in the 2015-2020 APNU+AFC Government, they cannot distance themselves from the track record of that Government of imposing over two hundred (200) new taxes and charges on the backs of Afro Guyanese, taking away cash grants from Afro Guyanese children, denying Afro Guyanese children laptops from a One Laptop per Family programme which they inherited and scrapped, taking away from Afro Guyanese pensioners, subsidies for water and electricity, imposing VAT on medical, educational and agricultural supplies on Afro Guyanese, taxing to the hilt, Afro Guyanese miners, imposing 1500 percent increase on land rents and rates for State lands occupied by Afro Guyanese farmers, and I can continue but space will not permit me.
The truth is that many of those scheduled to speak rely on the racial mantra for their sustenance. To survive therefore, they are willed to perpetuate this mythical message of racial segregation. However, with greater opportunities being created and resultant advances being progressively made by Afro Guyanese, this racist brew is correspondingly losing its potency, emancipating thousands from the mental servitude to which they were once shackled. It is a recognition of this reality that has driven an irreverent few to the extremity expressed in the thematic title of the proposed discussion. In the years to come and with it, the definite continued upliftment of every Guyanese, including Afro Guyanese, history will footnote them in ignominy.
Yours faithfully,
Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC, MP,
Attorney General and Minister of
Legal Affairs
