Land indiscretions have to be reversed

Dear Editor, Lands purchased by Afro-Guyanese after emancipation were under attack by the then colonial state because they provided the freed slave with living space and potential independence. Those lands that were inveigled from their village owners then and over a century later have never left the memory of those descendants; their concerns in 2017 are not based on prescriptive rights but on stolen rights of purchase. Do the three media declarations made by PPP party members, Ms Gail Teixeira, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo and the tremendously misinformed Mr Harry Gill convey a peculiar sensation of guilt? But then Pradoville Two is presumed to have joined the indiscretions of nineteenth-twentieth century Booker Bros McConnell & Co Ltd. Others are a result of whose deliberate scheming and dishonest actions? Mr Harry Gill asks in his letter, “Why did ACDA not take this matter to Forbes Burnham or to Desmond Hoyte?” The answer is that ACDA did not exist when these former Presidents governed this land. Back then sugar was a serious contributor to the GDP, despite the PPP’s mismanagement of the sugar industry. Since the fall of sugar in Guyana and worldwide, there will be downsizing of that industry and rather than have the issue of these lands from GuySuCo confused with lands which the state can dispose of as it finds necessary, there is no better time to reassert legitimate claims for those and