Our marginalised hinterland communities

If there has been, in recent weeks, an editorial preoccupation on the part of the Stabroek Business pertaining to the hinterland, more particularly, coverage of some of the socio-economic currents in Region Nine, that is to say Lethem and some of its satellite communities, that is because the underdevelopment of the hinterland and the marginalisation of its communities continue to be serious fault lines in the country’s overall governance structure. These blemishes, we believe, must remain at the forefront of the national agenda until there is real (as against contrived) evidence of positive change.

Two points should be made at this juncture. First, that the protracted underdevelopment of our hinterland communities and their Amerindian populations persists even as other countries and regions continue to take assertive initiatives to ensure, to a much greater extent than had historically been the case, that the rights and entitlements of their Indigenous peoples are properly written into the scripts that guide their development. Secondly, and in the particular instance of Guyana, it is, surely, a travesty that even given the socio-economic portents that derive from the country’s oil and gas pursuits, nothing appears to have been written into our agenda that speaks specifically to what lies in store for our Indigenous people and their communities.

And while it is not a question of taking political sides in the recent sharp exchange between the Prime Minister and the Deputy Speaker of the House over what a media report described as the “non-consultation with Amerindians and Amerindian rights groups on several crucial issues,” it can, surely, not be denied that where decisionmaking on important issues is concerned, Amerindian communities are afforded little opportunity to seriously participate in the discourses and to influence the outcomes. One might add, of course, that the minimal substantive say enjoyed by our Amerindian communities on matters of national importance even when these concern them directly, is, quite simply, a matter of fact. Frankly, successive attempts, over time, by representatives of political administrations to deny this have come across as clumsy and altogether unconvincing.

The focus of the current national agenda targets almost entirely, oil and gas and their portents as drivers of the country’s economy. At the same time there has been no structured attempt, as far as we are aware, to hitch the sails of hinterland development – and by extension, the development of Amerindian communities – to the mast of the country’s envisaged petro-prosperity.

To dwell momentarily on the Stabroek Business’ recent coverage of some aspects of hinterland affairs, what stood out in our engagements with business persons, public officials and ordinary residents of Lethem and its satellite communities is a sense of uncertainty about the future of their families and their communities. In some villages, we found evidence of ways of life that are not vastly removed from the condition of drudgery and an absence of amenities in which previous generations had lived and, as well, a strong sense of uncertainty as to whether the prevailing conditions will not be inherited by succeeding generations.

We also found in Region Nine among the Indigenous peoples living in the various communities, a strong sense of being removed from the mainstream of the wider Guyanese community and indeed an indifference to that mainstream. This, unquestionably, speaks to the failure of government, over time, to begin to bring a greater sense of urgency to placing the welfare of Amerindian communities much higher on the national agenda. Here, those who govern should be warned that, over time, a sense having been cut off from the socio-economic mainstream can, over time, breed a sense of cynicism that derives from an absence of belonging. That can redound to the disadvantage of the country, as a whole.