OPINION: The PNC goes to Washington, it should have stayed home

Last Updated on Monday, 2 October 2023, 12:46 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

The PNC went to Washington, DC, recently.  It should have stayed put, and enjoyed the incinerating heat of Guyana.  The PNC team was not James Stewart’s Mr. Smith goes to Washington, but a damp squib that fizzled out.   What the PNC team did in Washington was to roast itself alive, and over a slow, public fire for good measure.  The burning issue on the table was discrimination against the party’s supporters, primarily Black Guyanese.  Long before the time was over, or the listening Congressional team that consented to give the visiting PNC team an audience were done, the Guyanese travelers and pleaders were in ashes.  So, where does this leave this incendiary and animosity driven matter involving political and racial discrimination?  It is either present here, or it isn’t.  According to the PPP Government, it has emerged from a testing moment looking good before the world.  To say this another way, there is no such thing as political or racial discrimination in Guyana, and that is the end of the story.  Except that it is not.  Not as I see matters.

One of the first things I learned from my years in the cold was that when high access is granted, then the moment has to be seized with both hands, and milked for all that it is worth.  Don’t just walk with problems, be sure to offer possible solutions.  Make a good impression, and the door is always open for a second round.  Make a fool of self, and the door is slammed shut on the way out, rarely to be reopened.  I think the latter covers where the PNC stands currently.  In other words, go prepared for most eventualities, or don’t go at all; most of all, don’t go with ‘two lang haan’ as Guyanese would say, for the road to recovery may forever be lost.  By any measurement, this is a rank injustice to its people who are struggling under the weights of either subtle or barefaced discrimination, and are now forced to face the reality of another failure by its own.

Credible legwork has been done, and reveals that discrimination has been practiced in some sensitive protective constitutional agencies.  Regarding the sharing of relief monies to Guyanese who have been hit hard, the record is of a distinct skew in who gets more, who gets less, who gets nothing at all, and who gets more often, when the inexplicable is at work.  The complaints and comparisons leave no doubt as to the political ugliness and racial inequity that have been at work, given those who have repeatedly come up shorthanded.  On sharing in the national patrimony, new and old, there has been mainly only one kind of people.  With these areas alone, the PNC had enough persuasive material to make a halfway decent case about discrimination in Guyana during its time in Washington.  The sad fact is that it made no case at all, and looks the worst for it.

Now, I want to proceed with this along another line.  The PPP Government has been strident to the point of shrillness, [and truculence] whenever discrimination is tabled.  Previously, PPP pundits have been quick to whittle down or dismiss discrimination contentions as yet more instances of anti-PPP naysayers making mountains out of ant’s nests.  Nonetheless, there is the record of leading government figures running around and putting down sharp agitations in too many Black communities for comfort.  Those residents were neither creating a ruckus for the fun of it; nor because their hands idled.  They live with neighbors and see firsthand the disparities in the distribution of government favors; plus, they labor with their own hardscrabble conditions.  In today’s oil rich Guyana, all should see economic and environmental oases, and they ought not to be the mirages that they are for those on the wrong side of the PPP because they are from the wrong grouping.

Since claims of racial discrimination are treated as nonexistent from all and sundry in the PPP, it is strange that both the government and party leaders go out of their way to attack those who call them out, about discrimination, lack of robust oil management, and no pioneering and transformational leadership of the kind needed here.  The three areas are all interrelated: do well in one, and the others are boosted for the better.  My thinking is why even give the time of day to those who are critical of the PPP Government on the hot button issue of racial discrimination.  Since there is nothing of substance to talk about on that score, then it is better to leave them alone, and let the world see them for how the party wishes them to be seen.  As agitators.  As troublemakers.  As dividers.

From my perspective, when the PPP and its brass (some very brassy and brass-faced people, indeed) focus so much and so hostilely on those who speak of racial discrimination here, it is as if there is something to hide.  I begin to think that there is a big family secret that is best covered up, not even to be muttered in private parlays.  Sometimes, government leaders protesteth too much, and PPP fundamentalists spill too much ink.  The bottom line is that if racial discrimination is negligible, then all Guyanese should be living happily and contentedly.  Now, I want to see who would try to push that one on anybody.