THIS week, an interesting question about national vision came up, and the yearning for a vision like Forbes Burnham’s was central to this. It struck me in the course of the conversation how little we talk about ideology locally, and as a result, how little we appreciate its impact on our lives and certainly on our history. Both Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan were intelligent, studied men with a keen awareness of the struggles of their time. How could they not be, champions of independence that they were? But do we take this awareness seriously?

Communism is often associated with Jagan and socialism Burnham, but I want to clarify a core common element between these ideologies and thus the thinking of our founding fathers. As a result of not taking the roots of these ideologies seriously, I worry that Guyanese are not able to see how likely it is that if the roles were reversed and Jagan had come to power, we would have followed the same type of policies that led to our current relatively limited level of economic development.

It is common tradition to blame race relations for national failures and indeed this has been a long-standing drag on progress. But what this masks is that it hasn’t really mattered the colour of your skin — our most senior Guyanese leaders have had a consistent policy approach. This approach has had very few successes internationally, from the Soviet Union’s famines under communism to China’s poor economic performance before allowing private enterprise. Needless to say, the people of these countries are of different races, yet both states performed poorly in the long run.

What, then, is this toxic notion that keeps dragging economies down, subduing bright development prospects such as Guyana, and turning us against each other? That notion is simple: private ownership of the means of production. Karl Marx, the champion of communism, whose ideas also informed socialism, helped birth a worldview hostile to the private ownership of production, the bedrock of capitalism. Those who have read the communist manifesto will easily note the bitter hatred expressed for capitalists. It is true that capitalists can visit grave ills on society, but hatred is a strong word, leading to strong actions.

We almost never acknowledge that fundamentally both Jagan and Burnham had a big philosophical issue with private ownership. Maybe this was a legacy of their colonial experience, as it was for many newly independent countries, but one way or another this made them hostile to the types of free-market policies that could have moved our country perpetually forward. It is hard to hear Guyanese criticise capitalism, and then cite Singapore as a model for development, when that nation was long run by a businessman pursuing free-market policies.

This makes me think that those putting forward such criticisms, advocating strongly for state ownership, simply don’t understand in any kind of depth the ideologies they propose. If they really did, then Cuba should be our model for development and no one should ever mention Singapore. I am not going to say there is nothing worthwhile in the Cuban model of development, as surely there is, but I suspect that Guyanese have always thought that our country would [elson.low1]end up like Singapore, that this is where our founding leaders were taking us. The alternate direction in which we were being taken certainly has its own merits, but the view that we were going to end up like Singapore just wasn’t accurate.

So where does that leave us? What that original discussion showed me is that Guyanese are in the awkward position of not being able to look back for models of development, while not being totally comfortable with the alternative, which is robust capitalism. Perhaps, then, we should pursue the Nordic model, where high taxation and social policies reign. But can we sustainably pull that off? Not only is our population far more diverse, which provides challenges to development, our level of education is right at the bottom, with the highest level of brain drain worldwide, whereas they have some of the highest levels of educational attainment. Nordic model? Questionable at best.

No, we must take a hard look at ourselves, shed the ideological goggles of the past and try to find some clarity. Far from producing car batteries, prolonging public ownership of GUYSUCO and other hardly profitable ventures, we need to think strategically. Where Barbados has beaches we have vast lands to mine. Where Trinidad and Tobago had only oil we have oil plus investment opportunities in that same interior region.

We are no T and T, we are no Barbados. Investment in opening up the interior, facilitating private enterprise, will yield long-term growth. Guyana’s ceiling is far, far higher than theirs. Oil is a hammer, my fellow Guyanese, and we are going to use it to smash right through that ceiling.
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