FEAR stalked the land. Freedom then was only a word found in the dictionary, and a concept cradled in the soul of revolutionaries. The police were enforcers rather than protectors, and the soldiers and customs officers were terrorists holding the nation ransom to a despot.Food was a luxury: basic items were banned, and practically everyone, except for the bureaucrats, for whom nothing was restricted, became a criminal because everyone was forced to buy foodstuff on the blackmarket as a result of the most basic of necessities, including food and currency, becoming contraband by decree of the PNC’s rulers.
Housewives spent most of their days, sometimes with infants in arms, queuing up for a pound of butter, a loaf of bread, a pint of ‘kero’, or a roll of toilet tissue, and old people who tottered were lashed to stay in line by the mounted police. Babies’ milk was also banned.
Infrastructural and organisational systems had deteriorated to the point of almost complete dysfunction, so that rats were eating babies in the hospitals, and the education system became an abysmal failure as a consequence.
Children were kept out of school to look after younger ones while the mothers joined food lines that stretched for blocks, or they were forced to fetch water from long distances because GUYWA, like GPL and other utility providers, was on the brink of collapse. It was during that period of ‘Empty Rice Pots’ that education standards deteriorated, the school population declined, and the culture of children selling cigarettes and sweets on the streets evolved.
It was a time when the wages of public servants were frozen at $2,000 and, in order to keep jobs, Public Service employees were forced to march in sun and rain to glorify the Supreme Leader, to work for free on their weekends and holidays at Hope Estate, and to replace canecutters as ‘scabs’. It was a time of rigged elections, when patriots were killed defending ballot boxes, and revolutionaries were killed defending the truth.
To raise a voice in criticism of the Supreme Leader or the administration courted death, jail on trumped-up charges, or terror tactics targeting one’s family members.
Infrastructure and souls were degraded and decayed, and hopelessness held the land in a grip that wrested acceptance from a beaten people. It was into such an ethos, such a dynamic of terror that a brilliant young historian named Walter Rodney decided to join forces with the revolutionaries in the PPP who were courageously, at great risk and sacrifice, trying to unseat a monolithic monster, up to that time, with no success.
At the time, it was perilous to hold meetings, because thugs from the infamous administration-sponsored House of Israel beat and terrorized those who participated or attended. They did not even stop at murder, and many paid the supreme price, including the gentle, peaceful photographer of the Catholic Standard, Fr Bernard Darke, who was run down and stabbed with the bayonet of a rifle in plain view of onlookers; as well as the hope of Guyana’s future, Walter Rodney, who was blasted to smithereens by an assassin’s bomb.
It was the worst of times for this nation, but it was also the best of times, because courage blossomed in hearts like budding flowers. Spring of hope was in the air, and patriots were prepared to lay down their lives, and often did, for a long-cherished dream of real freedom, which had not been conferred on this nation, even after the grant of the instruments of independence by Great Britain.
Terror and fear were palpable; but so was determination. And that determination gave rise to a national avalanche that eventually swept the PNC out of the corridors of power and installed, for the first time in decades, a constitutionally elected government in October of 1992. This was indeed the dawn of a new era, and a new broom that gradually and miraculously transformed Guyana in an unparalleled dynamic of social development and economic growth, which are under threat once again by the very people who took Guyana and Guyanese to subterranean levels of international growth indices before a PPP/C Government, under the guidance of this country’s foremost freedom fighter and Father of the Nation, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, and successive PPP/C presidents, especially the “Architect of Modern Guyana” and crafter of The Poverty Reduction Strategy, the National Develoment Strategy, the LCDS, et al, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo.
Governing the nation during the last two decades and creating a growth pattern with a consistent, upward trajectory has not been an easy proposition for the PPP/C, because the PNC, in its new avatar of APNU, and its ally, the AFC, has had a continuum of destructive actions that caused much angst and retrogression in the fortunes of this nation, with many major developmental and job and wealth-creation initiatives being stymied and/or stopped cold by the combined opposition.
But the country descended into a new low with the new configuration in the National Assembly, which gave the combined opposition a majority of one seat, acquired with six votes; and today, the ugly head of the PNC is reared to strike once again into the heart of the nation.
Non-compliance with FATF regulations regarding the countering of money laundering and terrorism in the world would visit recalcitrant nation states with such punitive ‘blacklisting’, it would take them into semblances of Guyana under the PNC’s administration. Unfortunately for Guyana, this nation is being held to ransom by a vengeful combined opposition, which refuses to support the vital passage of the Anti–Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Bill.
Their power-drunk and vengeful grandstanding has reached a level where their conditions for support of this vital Bill has put this nation between the devil and the deep blue sea: that the Government accepts their recommendations for amendments, which will revert Guyana to the days of the Draconian rule of the PNC; or else non-support of the bill with a consequential blacklisting by FTF, which will transpose this nation again to a socio-economic landscape and ethos of want, hunger and hopelessness.
The amendment the opposition proposes seeks to give police and customs officers the power to seize currency of over $2M (US$10,000) in cash, cheques or value, such as money orders, jewellery, gold, bills of exchange, negotiable instruments, precious metals and gems, etcetera, and arrest persons if it is suspected that it is the proceeds of money laundering.
These officers would also be vested with the power to invade homes and business places, at any hour, to ransack private spaces for what would then be contraband, as in the good old days of yore under the PNC’s Draconian rule, when almost every householder became a criminal.
As Roshan Khan observed in the letters column: “This is madness, as prohibition will cause wholesale smuggling of currencies out of Guyana, due to the reality that people will not have faith in the country and economy, and will wonder if next time the APNU might want to seize any money anywhere.
“The people of Guyana cannot forget the whole banning of food items, particularly flour and like, which led to an amazing growth of illegal wealth by the smugglers, and the export of cash by every and any means.“
I ask the people of this country: do you recall the days when Guyanese, under the Burnhamite PNC, could not pass the airport with anything more than $25US? Or the time when fingers were prodded into peoples anuses and vaginas? Yes, youths who do not know. Under the Burnhamite PNC, this happened. And many were imprisoned, as some had to get money out to buy things like medicine, a gallon of paint, and building materials.
Said Roshan, “One could not go on a holiday with anything of value; not even a piece of jewellery, except the marriage ring; and that had to be small. Jewels and monies that were seized were used as bribes in order not to be charged. In the search room, people will tell the police or customs officials to keep the money and gold…It was truly a shameful era.
“And many were bribed to get money out, some with tins of smuggled sardines or corned beef, or a pound of flour, onions or garlic for Government officials’ assistance. During this time, Guyana fell on its knees as it became a basket case and the mockery state in the Caribbean. It was a time when women had to sell their bodies in Suriname and Trinidad to bring foodstuff to sell in Guyana’s markets and feed the nation. Guyanese were in shame everywhere we went. Many slept at airports and wharves.”
Then also the question of the integrity of mandated officers is in doubt, and numerous incidents abound – of monies, jewelry and other items, such drugs seized by law enforcement and customs officers with only partial, or in some instances non delivery of these items to designated authorities; the time-consuming, frustrating, expensive process of recovery, most often through the courts by the legitimate owner and/or legal authority will frustrate the process into extinction.
This does not take into consideration the dangers posed to home- owners and private entrepreneurs, and among the plethora of instances when bandits, pretending to represent a legal entity, forced entry into premises then proceeded to rob, injure and even kill their victims. One can recall the brutal death of Frank Persaud, of Bel Air, who was forced to open his warehouse to bandits posing as customs officers, only to be killed and robbed. The implications of the Opposition’s proposal to the safety and well-being of Guyanese citizens are too horrendous to contemplate.
Alternatively, the Opposition’s non-support of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Bill would mean blacklisting by FATF, which will consequence, inter alia, developmental and charitable loans and grants drying up; banking internationally will be impossible; money transfers will freeze; many will lose jobs, as industries will close or minimise operations, among other consequences no less deleterious to the national economy and Guyanese welfare and well-being.
The combined parliamentary Opposition’s grandstanding and blackmail for irrational demands to be met has stymied the passage of the amended Bill which currently sits in a Special Parliamentary Select Committee.