The chaotic Republic of Guyana
Wanting order in one’s life is a universal human desire. No normal person wants chaos. In our personal lives we want and work towards states of order. Ideally we keep our homes and surroundings clean; we look to create harmony and predictability within and outside of our families; we save for our children’s university, for our old age. We are constantly securing ourselves against the chaos and uncertainties that life throws at us.
In developed countries citizens pay taxes and in return the state assists them in varying degrees from state pension plans to free tertiary education, free and quality healthcare. The French state will pay for its citizens to spend three weeks at a therapeutic spa. La belle vie! In one respect Covid-19 has been a blessing as it has finally concentrated the minds of Western politicians, after years of Darwinian capitalism, towards the protection and economic welfare of their citizens through significant disbursements and other reliefs.
Much of what governments and municipalities do surrounds the simple and pretty basic maintenance of order. Creating and enforcing zoning regulations, disposing of garbage and cleaning neighbourhoods. The judiciary and police play an important part in the maintenance of an orderly society from punishing “disorderly behaviour” in its broadest sense be that deviant driving to noise nuisances.
Civilised societies are founded upon order. The Brazilian motto on its flag is “Ordem e Progresso” - order and progress - and springs from a quote by science-based positivist philosopher France’s Auguste Comte (1798 1857): ”Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal”.
It is important however not to conflate what is an emphasis by governments on order with authoritarianism. While fascists and to some extent conservatives do like to promote their ability to maintain order especially when it comes to crime, they certainly do not have a stranglehold on it. Yes, Mussolini was said to have made the trains run on time in Italy but so did many other democratic countries and Italy still does today despite having a tumultuous democracy that has seen 69 governments since World War II. Orderliness should be about creating the framework for a harmonious society: a commuter knows the train will be on time so has no need to barge past his fellow worker.
By now the reader will be getting an idea where this is heading….little to none of this exists in Guyana let alone any trains. In fact the state contributes to this disorder with frequent
blackouts, water-outs, traffic mismanagement, a “bankrupt” national insurance scheme…among a multitude of incompetencies. In short this country is very, very badly run.
And as we get older we need more order. We become physically vulnerable and rely more on healthcare and other social services. This may be why so few Guyanese physically remigrate despite the exhortations of this government. Having fled the disorder of their homeland decades past and then been cocooned in systems that care for them, coming home and expecting a peaceful, stress-free retirement they often experience a shock to endure a bureaucracy that is non-responsive and often unjust. Case in point was that of the Suttons who, having begged for and bought a house lot from the relevant ministry for $6M in 2020, were told two years later that their documents could not be found.
At this point we must stick a pin and acknowledge that as citizens we contribute greatly in big and small ways to this chaos through antisocial and delinquent behaviour. We park and double park wherever we wish, drive drunk and/or recklessly, we vend on city sidewalks, we play loud music wherever and whenever, evade taxes, steal electricity, launder money, smuggle chicken, liquor, cigarettes…the list goes on. But it is the state that is duty bound to regulate our activities.
The burden of this chaos falls most squarely on Guyana’s underclass who do not have the means to insulate themselves through such luxuries as water tanks, generators, private cars, schools or hospitals. And of this demographic it is the women who bear the most burden. Comfortable readers of this newspaper may have gotten a sense of this through accounts of the deaths of the three children of Tracy Flue, a young mother living in Barnwell, Mocha backdam. Apart from being a personal tragedy it is a microcosm of how the complete lack of social services, police protection and basic infrastructure led to the avoidable deaths of her children. According to her statements to the press, she was in an abusive relationship which she had reported to the police to no avail. She had no child care so resorted, inadvisably, to securing her children in her home and going off to her security job each night. The house caught fire. The fire service responded but the state of the dam meant they were
unable to reach the home. The children perished. Many have since lamented and prayed over this avoidable tragedy but it is not out of the ordinary and it was not an accident. It is the perfect intersection of the state’s neglect for its people.
The government with its sudden bags full of oil money, likes to talk about “people-centred development”. It’s one of those slogans politicians like to utter that has zero actual meaning. And in fact this administration’s current emphasis on “transformational infrastructure” - another empty epithet - such as bridges, highways and even a stadium for Berbice - will not address a single factor that led to these three children’s deaths nor the real hardships of working class Guyanese. Nor will the $1.9B giveaway to miners and all the other ad hoc handouts. Because this is not about money. This is about understanding what are the issues surrounding the deaths of these children and all the other tragedies then building and staffing fully funded social welfare systems to address them. It is the kind of hard work that is simply beyond their capabilities and one suspects is not a priority.
The President’s pet motto “One Guyana” is similarly vacuous. Of course we should aspire to unite as one people but really in our everyday lives racial tensions pale in comparison to the lack of order and the daily injustices of living in a deeply dysfunctional society. It is why some in this country unfortunately wax nostalgic for colonial times. That is misguided but what has been lost since independence has been order. And not all of this descent into chaos can be attributed to the country’s economic decline. There are many other poor countries that are simply better run. Moreover what is becoming clearer is that all this oil money will not restore order. Instead we are moving from a very poor disordered state to a very rich disordered state. What will be the politicians’ excuse then?