Dear Editor,
The following has been submitted for consideration and adoption as our supplemental motto, a contemplation to guide our national affairs: ‘A country which fails to defend its democracy, the human rights of its citizens, consents to and justifies the abuses of its government.’ We should also consider that when we vote for abusive politicians, we are agreeing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to abuse us and rob us of national wealth, as is currently being done with the Exxon contract.
Guyanese today are the bridge from the past endured by our ancestors, to the future we continually struggle to define for ourselves, our children. As we have continually witnessed through the last ten to fifteen, twenty years, many of us have found ourselves taken advantage of by our governments and the systems they employ in managing our affairs.
Especially in the last ten years, we have come to understand that our politics and our political actors have, and continue to be the source of our poverty, insufficiency and substandard welfare we are forced to endure. We still have yet to grasp that we are being programmed into accepting who we have become, that we are the fault of our failings and insufficiencies.
We have yet to accept that we have and continue to be manipulated for political gain, to keep us from attaining a proper education, from becoming financially independent, because if we as a people did become educated beyond the limitations placed upon us by our governments, if we did become financially independent of government, we would understand that our politicians have only been using us, that they have no regard for proper systems of government, because these would keep them from engaging in corruption and transfers of massive sums of our hard-earned taxpayers’ dollars to their families and friends. Never forget Fip Motilall and the US38.0 million road to Amaila Falls and the G$400,000 CJIA toilet bowls.
Instances of the programming to which I refer abound, and start from the conditioning of (1) rice farmers to accepting the losses and abuses perpetuated by rice millers against them, (2) sugar workers who hold on to whatever they can get, these poor workers, many if not all without any proper secondary school education, being maintained for their votes at national elections; (3) approximately 75% of the population who leave school without a proper primary or secondary education who easily believe that they weren’t good enough, but do not understand that it is the government’s education system, from top, to bottom, which failed them, (4) public servants whose rights continue to be trampled upon by the president himself, his administration, many of whom have yet to come to terms with the fact that government owes them millions of dollars.
(5) sections of the population seeking to earn a living from growing cannabis sativa, a product legalized in America, Canada and a multi-billion dollar industry, criminalized because our governments do not want them to become financially independent; (6) The thousands of workers in the private sector, whether on Regent Street or in some shop or business in Linden, Buxton, Charity, New Amsterdam or the Corentyne, have to endure oppressive wages and conditions because there are little or no job alternatives; (7) our nation’s vendors who have been conditioned to wage war for space that is not theirs, for the right to encroach on other people’s businesses; (8) retired persons who have been conditioned to being robbed of their rightful retirement benefits after cost of living adjustments through the decades.
Unless we make any meaningful effort to stop these abuses, we will live and die in the poverty and insufficiency endured by our parents and grandparents. In contemplating our present and immediate future, we have to come around to the reality that Guyana has a dysfunctional democracy. As much as we can joke and ridicule the PNCR for its obtuse voting mechanisms at its internal elections, this we cannot do at all for the PPP. Because the PPP does not have constituency elections with elected representatives.
To the best of my knowledge, the PPP is not a democratic institution which allows persons to be elected to serve. Its ‘representatives/technocrats’ represent no one. On the other we have an opposition which smashed its image as a national political party, and is ready and willing to rig and steal any election in which it happens to be in government.
Guyana’s teachers want their due adjustments to their salaries in addition to the amounts outstanding over the years the administration the terms of collective bargaining with their representative union. It is time this government pay us our money. Guyanese have a lot to think about regarding their welfare, their children. They have decisions to make.
Sincerely,
Craig Sylvester
