Dear Editor
HARRY Gill, the newest hand to clutch the political straw, announces that the PPP left a vibrant economy to the APNU+AFC Alliance, in his letter Sept, 11 Kaieteur News. I am not in any office of the Government, but I live in Guyana, longer than Harry Gill has. The economy is reflected in the earnings, social environment and safety of the people.
Guyana from British Guiana to 2017 has not had a vibrant economy in the idealistic definition, but we can measure achievements through Governance that has taken us from the colonial stratification of political, economic and cultural dependence, to a realisation of awakening to our own environment and to its opportunities. What was the PPP’s contribution in those formative pre-independence years? They took us down into the shadows of a racial civil war for power, that has divided this country to date, not for the holistic benefit of then British Guiana, nor in 1992 for today’s Guyana, they remained consistent and fossilised and took that mentality beyond 1992. By the first years we witnessed the police shooting at nurses, the beating up of customs employees, ethnic cleansing to the point that Luncheon declared that “there aren’t any Afro-Guyanese qualified to become ambassadors.”

On the Island of Antigua by 1998, of its small population of some 65,000 persons, there were almost 20,000 mainly Afro-Guyanese. The PPP came into power in 1992; by the end of 1993, they had a 10 percent minister, another one that made a shipload of petroleum products disappear and by December 2008, the PPP’s Public Service Minister Dr Jennifer Westford was telling public servants to “spend wisely, because government in no position to offer year-end payout,” and that was 16 years after coming into power. Roger Khan of the ‘Troubled-Jagdeo years’ often boasted of paying the police’s salary. The PPP did not create a vibrant economy, it criminalised the nation, encouraged lawlessness and we have recently witnessed in 2017, they criminalised the police force with irregular and illegal customs of practice, creating alternative criminal authority gangs linked to PPP Big-Wigs, to which the police became subject.

From the pinnacle of its leadership, in what era of the management of this country could a comparison be made that equals what was done at NBS? The lives of managers Maurice Arjoon, Kent Vincent and Baldeo were turned upside down by a conspiracy of lies. Normalcy, their health and balance callously dashed aside to facilitate Jagdeo breaking the financial laws. Supporters of both APNU+AFC are angered today as to why both Jagdeo and Gopaul are not in prison.
In 2011, a political AFC ad reflected the accusation that the PPP was making civil contractors of party supporters fishermen; that evidence has become manifest with the consistent, collapsed houses across the country, with casualties emerging out of some, and the 2005 floods caused by incompetence posing as efficiency. What vibrant economy destroys public procedures and well-being, that a Minister of Health could respond to the fact that more than two-thirds of nurses failed their tests, with the directive to let them into the system? “They will learn on the job” at the cost of human lives? We had no vibrant economy under the PPP; we had a nation that descended into all-out lawlessness, that depended on remittances from Suriname, Trinidad, North America, Antigua, Venezuela, the UK, Canada etc. Except for Canada, all those countries have become ‘economically tight,’ some more that others…most of our opinions from the business sector on our economy lack a holistic view, and seem to evolve from a perspective from the depth of their own coffers.

New factors have to be taken into consideration, A- That over the past 10 years, possibly over 100 thousand Guyanese have applied and received U.S. visitor visas. It’s significant, there is an idea in many Guyanese that one can with smart purchases overseas remake passages invested, with a profit, true, I did some of that in the late 1990s, but we were a few travelling then, in some cases you barely cleared, and we did not shop where the new breed are shopping. Let’s do the math. Say 10,000 people travelled to the U.S. at the minimal cost of ticket + travelling money, of $300,000.00 per person, that would be a sum of $300,000,000 G$ of the grassroot economy; look around at the clothes, fragrance & tin stuff stands with barrel stocks all across the country, and you would recognise a glut of such goods and goodbye to much-needed remittances, while with decreased sales to boutiques and stores etc., those tickets in less than 1% involved further education courses in the U.S. We don’t even benefit from the airfares, because we have no national carrier, and every book-keeper will agree that the absence of such finances will reflect further than I’ve indicated. B- In my article at GNNL, I have repeated the loss of jobs to modernisation, I repeat it again, from the 1900s onward, blue collar Georgetown was supported by waterfront jobs from La Penitence to the GRB. In the late 1970s, there were no less than 1,000 souls employed per shift, in a two-shift, sometimes, as with GRB with an around-the-clock system.

The stevedore embodied a formidable earning category. Except for GRB that was destroyed by political arson, the other jobs were lost to modernisation in merchant shipping; the stevedore is now history. These Jobs were never replaced. Lack of imagination and any innovative thinking has become a trademark of MP Gill and his colleagues. I will conclude by reminding Gill of the PPP’s state-sponsored pirating of text books (still happening). On more than one occasion, parents I knew innocently asked whether books didn’t carry indexes any more, on enquiring why the index was left out from one pirate printer, he looked at me as if I was crazy and asked “Deh got de book, wuh deh need dem back pages fuh?” So much for your vibrant PPP economy, based on what, giving away our resources for drawbacks, how do you give away 82% of your forest lands, and promise your fishing waters, is this your vibrant economy MP Gill?. Recently, a Caribbean group held a workshop here, directed at young start-up businesses. I was at the workshop, though I realised that their investors were not keen on venture capital for mature pioneering businesses. The fact is, look around, the future businesses of Guyana may very well be owned by Caribbean and other overseas investors willing to work with our innovative/creative people at some reciprocal level, keep it real.
Regards
Barrington Braithwaite