I NOTICED the daughter of Mr. Brindley Benn wrote a letter in the Guyana Chronicle yesterday on his 101st birth anniversary. I have had a close relationship with Brindley Benn. There were youths around the same age who saw a political future in the PPP. The year was 1968. It was me, Leyland DeCambra, and Ronald Gordon. Leyland and Ronald are very much alive and live in Guyana. Our political frustration drove us into the arms of Brindley Benn and his party, the Working People’s Vanguard Party. I have fond memories of Brindley.

All three of us embraced Marxist politics and saw the working class and the rural proletariat as the classes our activism would be devoted to. People go their separate ways. Leyland went to East Germany, Ronald almost became Guyana’s first African Hindu priest, and I was the only one that remained in politics.

This is the environment in which my politics evolved, and I have never ever detached myself from my political roots. I was a working-class activist at 16, and I have never removed myself from that existence now that I am in my early seventies. Tragically, I believe all my decades of activism, my 26 years as a UG lecturer, and my 35 years in journalism will come to naught in 2024 because I see the proletariat in Guyana and the rural peasantry in decline without a protective hand. That hand was large and ubiquitous in the environment my politics were born into.

I was chatting with the famous Dominic Gaskin, a former business minister and AFC executive, and we disagreed on the regrets we have in our respective lives. He said he does not have regrets when he looks back; he may acknowledge mistakes, but not regrets. My regrets are enormous. I regret the way I shaped my praxis. There have to be too many political and psychological cruelties in my life that the regrets will never fade from memory.

When I see how the commercial banks treat Guyana’s proletariat from one end of Guyana to another and no one does anything to confront such class bias, I feel my politics have been a failure. I get so many heartbreaking complaints about the mistreatment of Guyana’s working people by the commercial banks that I wonder what the people who protégéd me in politics would say if they were alive today.

Some of their names ring in my ears: Cheddi Jagan, EMG Wilson, Brindley Benn, Vincent Teekah, Boyo Ramsaroop, Brian Rodway, Dr. Josh Ramsammy, Walter Rodney, and Andaiye, among others. All of them, without exception, practised the politics of working-class liberation. I have never been close to a politician who is not dedicated to elevating the working people of the world.

In Guyana in 2024, an ordinary person cannot go into the bank with a million dollars to deposit it without an enormous burden to prove where he or she got it from. Per capita, Guyana has the largest diaspora in the world. Relatives and friends return for visits and give their relatives money.  A million or two million is absolutely no significant amount of money in the context of the Guyanese economy.

You go into the commercial bank with two million, which is a “small piece” from your visiting relative and that relative has to state if he or she gave you the money and that relative has to provide the bank with proof of earning and proof of employment in the foreign country he/she lives in.

This is the repression working people have to bear up with in Guyana. They simply find it impossible to bank two million dollars. To date, no political party, no trade union, no lawyer, no civil society group, and not one organisation has written about this abuse of people’s rights by financial houses in Guyana, including the NBS. An incident I witnessed at NBS last year got me so emotional that I wish I was young and radical again. Financial houses are wrongly using the anti-money legislation to devastate ordinary people in Guyanese society.

Guyana discovered a magic formula that would secure the future for all Guyanese. It is the oil industry. Yet to date, there are eleven (maybe more) lawsuits against the oil industry. All are from people with money who either belong to the upper middle classes or are wealthy. There has not been one writ filed in court against the denial of the rights of ordinary people by the commercial banks. When I was very small, there was a famous song by a group named the Kingston Trio. I leave you with the opening lines —

Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing Where have all the flowers gone Long time ago.