The long, long look back
Kaieteur News – Today begins a long look back at one of the worst years in British Guiana and Guyana – 2020. There is an ocean of materials to cover. I am not going to serialize my thoughts. People don’t like serial commentary. By the time they reach part three, they are interested in new things.
Over the next few weeks, I will be reflecting on the terrible, scary, extremely damaging year of 2020 and intersecting those columns with different topics. For example, my next piece will be my choice of the best article, which I have written over the past five years during the reign of the APNU + AFC regime, 2015-2020. Next week, I plan to vent my anger at a 30-year High Court sentence for a father who killed his three children. For now, let’s look back at 2020.
I knew that 2020 would bring psychic trauma to every citizen who was 18 in 1970. I sense the PNC was not going to surrender power. Five veterans must be analyzed because it was the seeds planted that brought poisonous weeds in 2020.
The first one was the results of the 2015 election. I’m still undecided on what actually happened with that opinion poll because American participation complicates things. Whatever the objective, concrete, scientific facts about the 2015 election, the result transformed the PNC into a Burnhamite monster.
It was either a PPP victory or the PPP lost by a few hundred votes. That’s when the PNC knew it couldn’t win another general election. Even with the influence of Moses Nagamootoo, Raphael Trotman, and Khemraj Ramjattan, the PNC could not win. The PNC planners figured he couldn’t win in the future.
From May 2015, the PNC decided it had to go back to rigging machines as developed by Forbes Burnham. The second factor was Justice Patterson as chairman of GECOM. The world knew that President Granger was making a fool of himself by asserting that the constitution stipulated that the chairman of GECOM must be a past or present judge. He stuck to that song because he had Patterson in mind all the time because this is where the rigging would be designed and executed – by GECOM led by Patterson.
Third, the creation of the presidency ministry was the controlling mechanism to achieve hegemony. That ministry and Granger virtually dominated all government operations. There was no coalition government. It was a PNC administration. But the AFC and WPA were stunned with power crumbs so they accepted the PNC hegemony.
Fourth, Granger wanted a kind of state power that would be similar to that of Burnham but without many of the essential features of the Burnhamite province. For example, Burnham had serious intentions to introduce socialist economics into policy making.
Granger was a shameless neo-liberal president so the state would not have participated in commercial investments. For Granger, power had to be used in the way Burnham used it. I think it would have settled for forms of the doctrine of party supremacy and there would have been a change in school curricula to incorporate historical materials on Africans in Guyana and the role of Burnham.
Fifth, there is no question in my mind that the state sector would have excluded East Indians in significant ways. The 2015 government was racist. The PNC state after 2020 would have diverged in scary ways to the Burnham, Jagan, Hoyte and Jagdeo presidencies. The four presidents had long decided that they would favor their own constituencies. This was the reality of Guyana. But the four presidents agreed in their own minds that the state would have people from across the ethnic fence in important and strategic roles.
I’m afraid under rigged elections in 2020 and 2025, Guyana would have seen a African-dominated state sector with the ideological thinking that the state belonged to an African place and the place of Indians was in business. I’m convinced in my mind that I would have done identical research to similar conclusions at the end of 2021 under the Granger presidency, just as I accused President Jagdeo of discrimination in an academic paper entitled, “Ethnic power and Ideological racism. ”
These were then the unifying factors at the beginning of 2020 that led to Guyana experiencing one of its most dreadful moments in more than 100 years. As the days go by, I’ll look at some shocking events in 2020 that were so shocking that it changed the way I look at my country forever. 2020 has been a Freudian gold mine for me.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)