The People’s National Congress (PNC) celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its formation, on Oct 5th, 1957. At such events, it was hoped, the present crop of leaders would have taken the time to do some serious introspection. Even though they were handed the government and independence, the country had been brought to its knees and divided by the time the Founder Leader, Forbes Burnham, had passed away on an operating table at the Georgetown Public Hospital in 1985.
President David Granger, its present leader, is a trained historian; and it was rather embarrassing to listen to the hagiographic account he delivered on Burnham’s legacy. One predecessor, Tyrone Ferguson, at least had the grace to offer a rationale for Burnham’s Faustian bargain struck in the 1960s: “To Survive Sensibly or to Court Heroic Death”. With the plethora of declassified British and American files, it is an insult to the collective intelligence of the Guyanese people to not even make a passing reference to that fateful decision.
William Faulkner famously pointed out that, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” And the PNC, most of all, should appreciate that bit of wisdom as it plots the course once again after its abysmally failed first 28 years. Especially after Granger has promised to fulfil the “legacy” of Forbes Burnham, who was quite self-conscious about that legacy. For instance, Granger was a young junior officer in the GDF when he was entrusted with disseminating Burnham’s vision for the new army. It was to be a “People’s Army”, with none of the fine points the British insisted was “tradition”, such as a loyalty to whichever Government was elected legitimately to govern the state. Now that Granger has already embarked on an expansion of the army, with ancillary wings such as Reserve and Cadet Corps etc., and there is a willingness to recruit into Government members of that army, maybe he should have pronounced on the army’s orientation.
On the economy, which is foremost on the minds of the citizenry, Granger has also signalled his desire to move the fulcrum of production into value added goods, with his albeit inelegant “six curses” remark. Burnham had berated the Canadian and US multinationals that had shipped our raw bauxite (with some alumina), and after nationalising them, had moved to establish a hydro-electric plant on the Mazaruni River to smelter bauxite into aluminium. While he has evidently nixed the generation of electricity via our abundant water resources, could the natural gas that Granger’s Minister of Resources is attempting to inveigle Exxon to send to our shores be used to add such value to the bauxite curse? He has already decided to rid the country of the sugar “curse”.
Socially, Granger has announced a programme of “cohesion” much as Burnham had boasted about bringing “Peace, Not Conflict (PNC)” to Guyana after the 1964 racial wars. This more than a bit ironic claim introduced the expression “those who call off the dogs own the dogs” into our political lexicon. However, when pressed later on the seemingly racist nature of his government’s hiring and firing practices, much as Granger’s Administration has been tagged, Burnham “explained” his reasons were “political, not racial”. Here, again, at least a fig leaf was offered.
Culturally, Burnham then boasted, and Granger now boasts, about introducing two holidays each for the Muslim and Hindu citizens of the land as a measure of the PNC’s “multi-religious” credentials. But Granger would know that the hundreds of years of Christian dominance that had become institutionalised would not disappear with the institution of four holidays. Within the broader ambit of “culture”, for instance, the National School of Dance, the new School of Music and all the official institutions of culture are certainly not inclusive of our multicultural nation. As with Burnham’s pride — Carifesta — there is only a genuflection to those cultures outside of the PNC’s base constituency.
The PNC has to do better.