Dear Editor,
I WRITE with reference to Kaieteur News editorial on April 23, 2023, under the title “Race and Politics in Guyana.” The editorial makes several major claims, none of which can stand up to basic examination by those who know something about “race.”

The overarching point made is that “…foreigners [are] coming to prosper from our many patrimonies [and] make fools out of us by encouraging the pitting of one group of Guyanese against the other.” There are indeed grounds to talk about foreign interference in Guyana. Our history is one of colonial conquest, imperial machinations, and of direct foreign inference in the years leading up to, and since independence. No one doubts, for instance, that Cheddi Jagan was removed from office by Western covert operations and constitutional trickery. No one doubts that Mr. Burnham and the PNC were installed, petted, and fattened by foreigners. No one doubts that the formation and consolidation of the PNC itself was bankrolled due to the politics of the Cold War. No one doubts that Rabbi Washington, a foreigner, was imported to practice violence against the political opposition in Guyana, including against the PPP and WPA.

Yet, I suspect that kind of foreign interference, and divide and rule, is not what the editorial has in mind. Rather, the focus is on Exxon and the EEPGL conglomeration. Well, we have a problem of mischaracterisation here. The oil companies have invested over US$30 billion in this country. Without these massive investments in oil and gas, Guyana would still be leaning on the traditional commodities for export earnings and employment – sugar, rice, bauxite, fish and shrimp, and gold and diamond.

The so-called foreigners, who are in truth astute foreign investors, are giving the Guyanese people the opportunity to stop fighting over the crumbs bequeathed to us through the political economy of plantation capitalism. Moreover, readers should know that oil & gas per se is only the leading edge in a whirlwind of FDI, all with significant local content protections. There is a vast secondary sector in services that now employs thousands of our people. Guyana’s historic problem with employment and underemployment is beginning to disappear, and in fact, we are beginning to have a reverse problem with shortage of (skilled) labor.

Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC are not here to extract or cultivate racial antagonism. They are here to make, and have already made, extremely difficult and expensive investments that are changing our economic and social landscape. What is worrisome is that editorials like the one under consideration are the real engines of racial engineering.

The editorial cannot be taken seriously on empirical grounds when it comes to a racialised political economy because it has no empirical grounds. On this score, I would like refer readers to an outstanding article by Neville Bissember, (“Is apartheid being practiced in Guyana?” Stabroek News, April 6, 2023) in which he systematically demonstrated that there are no grounds to talk about things like apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Guyana, as sometimes charged by irresponsible race merchants who are trying to earn their political stripes.

What the editorial does do is to concatenate foreign calamities, in this case US race politics, with political developments in Guyana. Apropos, the editorial posits that “[r]ace and politics prevent us from the life-giving exercise of BREATHING (my emphasis).” Well, we are all obviously “living and breathing,” in the literal sense. But the editorial’s real intent is to appeal to the politics and memory surrounding the dramatic murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, in Minnesota. Floyd’s murder was taped by a teenager and the video showed the suffering of, yet another Black man murdered by the very institution that was supposed to protect him. The Black Lives Matter movement globalised Floyd’s murder.

The universe heard George Floyd calling out for his mother, crying out – “I can’t breathe.” The KN editorial attempts to link this dastardly foreign racial trauma to Guyana. By doing this, it is Kaieteur News’ editorial that is using ‘the foreign’ to cultivate, legitimise, and reproduce narratives of racial division in Guyana. “Breathing,” as used in the editorial, is the deployment of a sign, in the semiotic sense of structural linguistics, and Baudrillardian cultural analysis.

On the economic side of the equation, since the editorial cannot disprove the fact that Guyana has one of the highest growth rates in the world, it resorts to a form of ‘jumbie’ social-economic theorizing. Here are the exact words on this score – “The reality is that Guyana has not even gotten off the mark, with Guyanese still on their knees, due to the paralysing hammer blows that race and politics have delivered on the head of each citizen.”

This is bunk because it is not only patently false, but also patently dangerous. Quite probably, the author of this editorial would not have read “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson. In this highly regarded work on development, the authors show that strong, democratic, inclusive political institutions are critical to economic advancement. Inclusive political institutions in turn are based on sustaining pluralism. On this basis, editorials such as that discussed here, are anathema to pluralism, and certainly to strengthening our political institutions. On this basis alone, the editorial is divisive.

The only Guyanese on their knees are the ones who are offering prayers. They are doing so in a country where freedom of secular and religious expression is not only guaranteed, but alive.

Readers would have picked up by now that far from foreigner investors being the perpetrators of political division, it is in fact the editorialising practices (literally) of some broadsheets in Guyana that are the purveyors of doom. They are the ones that are contributing to weakening our political institutions. Guyana has serious political divisions, but they are not based on race, per se. The real issue is that this country has strong social forces and agents of authoritarianism that are determined to keep their old ways marked by election rigging and various forms of intimidation. That is what KN should fight.

I rarely make comments that border on the ‘personal’ attributes of writers. I will, however, make an exception today. I taught ‘race relations’ for the better part of four decades at the undergrade and graduate levels. Based on that, I am humbly asking the publisher of Kaieteur News not to allow unqualified people to write on issues of such national importance. It is not worth it bro!

Sincerely,
Dr. Randolph Persaud