NINE organisations have come out against President Ali receiving the Global Africa Leadership Award. Of the nine groups, only one is known in Guyana –ACDA. If you name the other eight and ask every Guyanese in and out of the land if they ever heard about these entities, the answer is obvious. The other eight are paper organisations that have no existence.
The lamentation is the same – the Guyana Government discriminates against Afro-Guyanese. But the methodology is also the same – no documentation that can guide the researcher. The PNC and AFC participated in a conference in the US, organised by Rickford Burke and made accusations of racial discrimination in Guyana. But no research paper was offered to the attendees.
In an act of patent absurdity, a delegation of Afro-American politicians, based on the outcome of the Burke thing, came in November last year to gather material on state discrimination. It was both an act of absurdity and comicality because what the delegation came for should have been handed to them in the first place at the Rickford Burke gathering – documentation of state bias.
Guyana has a parliamentary opposition and IDPADA-G which, so far, collected almost half a billion dollars of development related assistance but to date there is no dossier on state prejudice on Guyana produced by IDPADA-G. What happened to the capacity to do research?
So, we come now to the award to President Ali. The accolade is given by the African Prosperity Network (APN) headquartered in Ghana. An important digression is important.
In April 2020 when the election crisis was ongoing, IDPADA-G wrote the visiting delegation of CARICOM Prime Ministers indicating to them that Guyana’s sociology is problematic and the Prime Ministers must go beyond national elections and look at those problems.
IDPADA-G received no response. We will never know the reason but we can do logical deduction. In April, when the letter was written, the President of Guyana was David Granger, head of the PNC which won the election in 2015 defeating the incumbent PPP. The chairman of the organisation, IDPADA-G, who wrote the letter was one of the persons in charge of conducting elections in Guyana – Vincent Alexander.
It is easy to guess why the Prime Ministers did not respond. They felt insulted by IDPADA-G. They knew that the loser of the 2020 election did not bring up Guyana’s problematic sociology to the world when it contested and won majority of the parliamentary seats in 2011 and the 2015 national elections. But when it lost in 2020, suddenly Guyana’s sociology had problems.
The very disregard shown to the CARICOM PMs in 2020 was no doubt felt by APN in 2024. In today’s world, you can Google just about anything. The people in the APN secretariat on receiving the letter from these Afro-Guyanese organisations, no doubt, Google them and couldn’t find anything on eight of them. The secretariat of APN must have been angered by the disrespect shown to them when they Google one of the signatures to the letter – Hamilton Green.
The people in Africa know about Green and Forbes Burnham and their totalitarian reign in Guyana and the state’s role in the assassination of Walter Rodney. In case you missed it, please read my published interview with Hamilton Green in the Kaieteur News of Monday, October 16, 2017. Asked if he had any regrets over the long years, as de facto second in charge of the Burnham administration, Mr. Green defiantly told me, “none whatsoever.”
It has to be unadulterated disrespect to a prestigious global organisation, the African Prosperity Network that represents the continent of Africa, to ask them to withdraw a highly prestigious award to the Head of State in Guyana and it is based on the accusation of racial discrimination- just that, nothing more.
The signatures expect this body to read the letter and believe it and withdraw the award. Isn’t this contempt for the continent of Africa? But the contempt goes deeper than what appears on the surface. What causes of the African people worldwide the eight organisations and Green have championed? Did any of these nine entities show public respect for the courage of South Africa in taking Israel to the World Court?
But more importantly, what have these nine organisations done for Afro-Guyanese? Afro-Guyanese youths filled the jails in Guyana for possession of a gram or two of marijuana during the reign of an Afro-dominated government between 2015 and 2020. African street vendors were hunted down under the Mayorship of Hamilton Green, as when there was apartheid in South Africa. Congratulations to President Ali on his award from the continent of Africa. He has done Guyana proud.