LISTENING to ex-PNC leader Mr. Corbin claiming that Lindeners deserve to pay low electricity charges as a right, because of their four-decades-ago contribution to the Bauxite Industry certainly puts a new spin on things. Linden is special to the PNC because 1963/64 started at Linden. So the freebies are a right. What else do Lindeners deserve as a right? Free housing and water and roads! And give what in return?
What do citizens elsewhere in Guyana deserve as a right for their contributions to Guyana? Higher electricity charges, etc, etc? What do I deserve for serving Guyana as a solider for 18 years and being a farmer for 30-odd years? Not looking for freebies from whichever party is in power?
Corbin seems to have selectively forgotten that many Lindeners in the days of DEMBA enjoyed super wages/salaries, even as a porter. In fact many coastlanders migrated to Linden (then McKenzie) because earnings and benefits there outstripped earnings elsewhere in Guyana. So, Mr. Corbin, Lindeners don’t do the rest of Guyana a favour. Like the Pork Knockers of yore, Lindeners made big bucks, wasted it, thought that bauxite was inexhaustible, prepared no Plan B, even as the bauxite industry was going belly up (which President Burnham himself admitted) and the reality today, thanks to their own doing, is that Lindeners must accept that the freebies they are unjustifiably enjoying must come to an end.
Let me draw a simple analogy for Lindeners whose leaders are using the electricity hike as a political football to kickstart racial disunity in Guyana: You baked a cake last week and have been eating of it since. There is now no more cake and you are hungry because you don’t or could not afford to bake another cake. You are angry and have started lashing out at people around you. Your friends gave you some money to cultivate other types of food so that you don’t have to depend on cake only. What did you do? You wasted the money away and kept going back to your friends for more money. It is cake or nothing else; and you want your friends to pay the bill!
Lindeners, political agitators, what has befallen LEAP and other initiatives into which billions of dollars of our money have been pumped? Who scuttled those programmes? Where were you, sudden-on-the scene leaders? Why didn’t you lend a hand to make those programmes work? Simple: those programmes were doomed to fail because the target beneficiaries were too lazy to make it work. After all, why work when your overall cost of living is way below the rest of Guyana?
Additionally, leaders, you need ‘angry’ people to repeat 1963/64 and the electricity increase presented that opportunity. Unfortunately, three lives were lost. I join in mourning for them for they were manipulated to be where they were.
They did not lose their lives because they protested the electricity hike per se, but because of the opposition’s thirst for power. They died because APNU and the AFC want power at any cost. If there is blood on anybody’s hands,  APNU and the AFC cannot be excluded.
Both APNU and the AFC are missing something. The Linden issue, if protracted and allowed to spread into other areas, will be a springboard for driving fear into PPP supporters. The recent comments by Granger at the unveiling of the Buxton monument have added to this fear. This is playing right into the hands of the PPP. Fear within the Indian collective will result in (re)migration to the PPP camp. Snap elections: a PPP majority.
I have been around long enough to qualify to offer a warning to the AFC: Remember the PNC/UF coalition! AFC, you are expendable! Your outing at the next elections will give you only two seats. You may have missed what Bisram said recently. The AFC’s showing at the last elections was because of Indian support. Your non-Indian vote was less than 10 per cent of the votes you got. The Indians gave you the balance of power in Parliament not to oppose the PPP in everything they do, but to jerk the string when the PPP steps out of line. Instead, the AFC is full-time bed partner with the APNU. That union can produce nothing but pain for this country.
Incidentally, among the holier-than-thou leaders of the AFC is one who owes the GRA millions. I am reliably informed that he also refuses to pay his mortgage with a certain insurance company. That is not difficult to verify. That is integrity for you, Guyana! What will they do if they have political power? Talk about skillet calling another skillet black!
If the AFC thinks that the PPP will disintegrate and disappear in another decade, they are bunkers. While Ramotar has not been assertive enough as General- Secretary of the PPP, the PPP is still the most experienced party around.
Ramotar has been legally and properly elected to that position and he has earned the right to lead the government of the day. If he continues to mess the country, it is sooner rather than later that he will have to throw in the towel. Wrestling political power through the back door will leave the opposition with no country to rule over. Guyana will implode. The army did that study after the 1960s. Granger knows of that finding. Not much has changed. Any major unrest and the Indians will fly out of Guyana by the hundreds. They have a strong enough economic base overseas to sustain them. The same cannot be said for the other major race.
The APNU (PNC) has a power base which is unproductive and will never change. Sixty-five per cent of their supporters are yet to cultivate productive work ethic. Go to government offices and NIS and GRO, Licence& Revenue Offife, Deeds Registry, etc. That is a reality; deny as they may, APNU (and AFC) will have to accept. Your supporters are not productive. If the APNU were to get power, the Indians will go. What production will come from those left behind? Remember the PNC was in power for 28 years. We ended up being the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Why? PNC supporters did not pull their weight. Burnham lamented that fact onto his death. So, Granger and troupe, refuse to accept what is staring them in the face – at your own peril. I would suggest that you get the Black collective to take to the soil. Our foreparents tilled the soil and they owned villages. What did we do? We sold the villages. That is the respect we have for our foreparents, and we boasted of “ancestral lands.” We sold the lands away.
We have just celebrated another year of Emancipation. Mr. Granger and other leaders, what is Emancipation if our behaviour shows an overwhelming dependence on others for our basic food? Whenever I say this I make enemies. But our salvation rests with respecting the sacrifices of our foreparents not demanding freebies on the basis of their sacrifices. We have to cut our own track. How many in the Black collective do? Rather, we show token recognition today and tomorrow. We buy food grown by others. Food, my brethren, will be the gold of this country. We grow food or we perish.
Also, we wonder why other races are economically strong.  They do not lament their ancestors and indentureship, etc, they cut their own track. They look forward not backwards.
May our work bring us true Emancipation!