BUDGET PRESENTATION 2008 - Raphael Trotman

Today I am at pains to debate this budget Mr. Speaker but out of a duty which falls on me as leader of the AFC I rise to make my contribution. I have searched through the pages of the document entitled “Staying the Course: Advancing the Transformation Agenda” and have found little upon which to mount the type of debate that we have unfortunately grown accustomed to. If truth be told Mr. Speaker, I am saddened and numbed by the recent carnage and massacre at Lusignan and Bartica which followed those in Agricola and Eccles in 2006. Again, I express my personal and sincerest condolences to the families of the victims who senselessly lost their lives, and again, as a national political leader, I apologise for my own failings over the years to prevent these occurrences. I am here out of respect for the institution of Parliament, or rather, what is left of it, and the memory of those who died.

Mr. Speaker every year at about this time the government introduces its budget and the opposition members are expected to behave loyally and obediently and feint and parry with the government ministers and others in a satirical theatrical performance that has come to be known as the budget debates. Every year that I have spoken I have asked the question of: what is the benefit of this exercise. I have never seen a debate that adopted any useful suggestions of the opposition which led to substantive changes in the estimates. By the way Mr. Speaker, I reject the usual drivel that this is the way it was under the PNC. If it was nauseating in the 1970s and 1980s then it is more nauseating in the 21st century.


This year, I can say without fear of successful contradiction, that the people are neither amused nor impressed by our behaviour. At the end of this exercise what do we collectively hope to achieve; how is the governance of the country improved; what benefits for social cohesion are derived; do the national indicators show that the people’s perceptions of politicians have improved and that our overall ratings are positive? Hon. Member Mrs. Philomena Sahoye-Shury, a veteran politician by anyone’s description, last night indicated that these were the worst debates in the history of her parliamentary involvement. That statement in itself should tell us something.

Indeed the people expect and deserve better from these debates, but yet the system that compels our presence here expects us to behave as adversaries and to disagree and yet we lament when this very behaviour occurs asking: “why can’t we all get along”…”why can’t we develop this country together.

What would it take for the Minister of Finance or Prime Minister prior to the presentation of a budget to contact the Office of the Leader of the Opposition and other parliamentary parties to ask whether he and or his party and other opposition parties have any specific requests for any of the Regions that they have constituents within. Mr. Speaker we are not getting the point. Minister Kelawan last night says that the RDCs execute the government’s programme not their own.

There is not a day that has gone by that we have not witnessed some terrible senseless killing. Guyanese life has become as Hobbes describes it: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, and if I may add, meaningless. Men are killing women, road users are being mowed down, elderly men suffering the ignominy of guarding someone’s property at night instead of being home with their wives and grandchildren and being bludgeoned; and worst of all, little innocent children have now become appropriate targets for extinction.

With this in mind Mr. Speaker I will not enter into a vitriolic attack on any minister, or colleague member on the government side of the House though I will say that I feel tremendous pity and disappointment for some in particular, but instead prefer to use the very limited time available to me to make a few pertinent statements. At the end of my presentation Mr. Speaker I hope, sincerely hope, that I would have been able to convince those gathered here that the size of this budget at $119.3 bln is meaningless unless we can arrest what is a certain descent into madness. I mean no disrespect to the Hon. Minister of Finance, my brother and colleague, or to his staff that worked assiduously to prepare this budget. Relative to the situation that we face since January 26, 2008, I suspect that within a few months unless we dismount and change course, and not stay the course that we are currently on, this document is not going to be worth the paper that it is printed on.

All economic prognoses and forecasts have to be revised in the near and long term. The events which began some years ago and continued on a new plane on January 26 and February 17 have permanently changed the landscape of Guyana socially, legally, politically and of course economically, and whether we are prepared to accept it or not, so too constitutionally. What I found truly amazing Mr. Speaker is the ease and ability of many speakers to express condolences at the events of January and February and then immediately go into boasting about bridges and roads as if to say that these events, these massacres, were aberrations or rippling distortions that have passed their way and will never been seen again. We can never go back to the way we were on the night of January 25, 2008.

What too many of us are not getting is that despite the best efforts made since 1966 this country continues to be divided, and because we are divided we are floundering on the brink of collapse. Every Head of State since then has struggled to govern a rich geographical area of 83,000 sq. miles, and to build a nation from six disparate groups with six cultures, customs, and mores. Too many continue to slip away, and of these, too many have decided, as their country men and women did even when the PNC was the governing party, that they cannot, and will not, be governed by the incumbent party.

With this in mind therefore I wish to proffer the thesis that outside of the increase in the allocation for crime and security in the 2008 budget that the remaining heads are now of little consequence because they are meant to be the spokes in wheel whose hub is disintegrating. Put simplistically as possible, I am saying that unless we get our crime and security situation and good governance platforms in place urgently, there will be schools, buildings, and bridges to spend money on but no people to benefit from them...they all would have left or become consumed in the looming conflagration. We will find ourselves stuck in the slush and filth of the “bottom billion” that Khemraj spoke about.

In this context, statements about bird watching and yachting are now bordering on the sublime and ridiculous. So too are statements about the government building bridges of friendship and social cohesion in the face of the worst massacres in our history barring Jonestown, and so too the unfortunate, uninformed, and uneducated statements made about the etiological or root causes of crime and insecurity and the catalysts which drive and accelerate them.

By way of example Mr. Speaker I will refer this Honourable House to two sectors to show the debilitating impact that the incidents of January 26 and February 17 have already had.

Tourism
Recent advisories issued by two very influential governments have put paid to the plans to develop the sector effectively at least in the near to medium term. The images of bodies slaughtered and piled in a boat like swine for guests of Baganara and the world to see, and the diatribe on NCN in the days which followed ensured that the local components were put in place to ensure that our tourism sector will be on its knees for many, many years.

National Security and Territorial Integrity
It is beyond a doubt that the twin matters of Foreign Affairs and National Security have been jeaporised by the ongoing criminal and terroristic activity in Guyana. As has already been pointed out, very little is being given to meet the needs of the military to take care of external and transnational threats. We need only to be reminded of the discovery of an 1100 meter airstrip in the Corentyne River, the incidents at Eterinbang and the Cuyuni River where Persram Persaud was killed and a year later, the destruction of two dredges by Venezuelan military detachments; the movement of narcotics and weapons across our borders, and of course heinous acts of piracy which continue daily, to know that the security forces cannot fight on two fronts at the same time. The argument is that we are having to invest more and more on internal security and will do so to the detriment of our external affairs and the protection of our territorial integrity.

It is a known fact that following the UN Law of the Sea Arbitral Award that there will be increased activity on in the EEZ for the exploration of oil and gas as Repsol of Spain and CGX are expected to explore and drill yet there is a weakening of our diplomatic and military effort to protect the gains that we have received. Scarce resources have to be diverted to the civilian policing matters. Already this week we have seen enhanced activity on the borders of Columbia by Venezuela and Ecuador relative to the operations of and against FARC. I need not ask whether we are prepared.


In the areas of crime and security and justice I wish to focus or to use an Americanism “focus in”

My views are well known as to what we are beginning to see signs of a burgeoning insurgency. I will develop this argument later on. In a letter dated February 4, 2008, addressed to his Excellency the President I informed him that “It is obvious that a group of Guyanese (or non-state actors) has decided to defy the authority of the State and are prepared to unleash unprecedented mayhem in our society as witnessed last Saturday January 26, 2007 in Lusignan, East Coast Demerara. This is a serious problem that has serious consequences for the national security, cohesiveness, and viability of the State of Guyana and cannot be left unattended. The recent events cannot be dismissed as mere criminal activity coming from any particular enclave of our society.” The high incidence of dissatisfaction, despair and disgust is pervasive as was witnessed firsthand by some members of the Cabinet who braved the angry residents of Lusignan and Mon Repos immediately after the slaughter.

Besides holding arms and issuing joint communiqués we must go further and deeper. This is not merely about power sharing or shared governance but something deeper and more far reaching. It is about making a last attempt to prevent the collapse of the nation state we call Guyana. It transcends issues as to who occupies ministries and departments and goes to the manner in which we educate, empower, encourage and elevate our people especially our youth to ensure that we do not leave a broken for them.

The fact that our present crop of criminals whether called: sycophants, terrorists, insurgents, guerrillas, or whatever label we use are of the average age of 18 and that some like “Nasty Man” are almost babes in arms, tells us that the seeds of this crop were planted within the last 15 years, or for those who do not understand, or don’t want to understand, under the period of governance of the PPP/C administration. These are the manifestations, unwanted and as offensive as they are, of a bad system of governance, and of bad governance itself.


Mr. Speaker, with each passing year I am becoming more convinced that Guyana’s mal-performance is a function of its colonial past. The greatest paradox of our time is that it is to that past that we must return if we are to have a future. Renowned professor of political science and international relations Kalevi Holsti in his work “The State, War, and the State of War” describes Guyana and a few other states thus:

“The colonial state’s main purposes had nothing to do with preparation for ultimate statehood, and everything to do with economic exploitation, building some infrastructure and communication, settling migrants, organizing plantation agriculture, introducing extraction of surplus through taxes, organizing some semblance of lower-level education and religious activity, and providing “law and order” so that these tasks could go on unhindered…From the beginning, then, the territorial limits of the colonies had little or nothing to do with the economic practices, identification, or the political organization of indigenous populations.

The colonial territorial unit bore little or no relationship to any pre-colonial ethnic, religious, political, social, or religious communities or political systems”

And so the leaders for freedom took over the colonial state; alternative forms of political organization, such as a return to traditional modes of governance, federations, or continent-wide units, lost all popularity and thus significant discussion. The colonial state, an organism that left legacies primarily of arbitrary boundaries, bureaucracy, and the military, was taken over by leaders who believed that they could go on to create real nations and master the new state. Some succeeded. Many failed, and it is these failures that have led to wars of a third kind.

These wars euphemistically referred to as being of the “third kind” are your coup d’ etats, insurgencies, terrorist activities, organized criminality, and death squads.

The military scholar Martin Van Creveld recognized this sometime ago in his treatise aptly entitled “the Transformation of war”. “There are no strategies and tactics. Innovation, surprise, and unpredictability are necessities and virtues. The weak must rely on guile, and often crime, to raise funds for the bombings, assignations, and massacres. Prisoners are used as hostages to extract political gains; terrorist’s incidents are designed to make publicity, not to defeat an enemy armed force. Terror is used to cow the timid, the “collaborators”, and the indifferent. The clear distinction between, the armed forces, and the society that is the hallmark of institutionalized war dissolves in “peoples’ war.”

The weak state is caught in a vicious circle. It does not have the resources to create legitimacy by providing security and other services. In its attempt to find strength, it adopts predatory and kleptocratic practices or plays upon and exacerbates social tensions between the myriads of communities that make up the society. Everything it does to become a strong state actually perpetuates its weakness.

This is known as the state-strength dilemma.

Four Responses to State-Strength Dilemma
Individuals and groups engage in quietism—say and do nothing and hope that the cloud of death will not stop at their doors.
Exit either through migration abroad or joining the underground economy-drugs, smuggling, graft/runnings. In 1992 the number migrating were estimated to be 20,000 annually. Recent estimates suggest that the rate of migration is 7 per 1000 annually and this is expected to rise to 10 per 1000 by 2010 (US AID 2006 Report on Guyana Economic Opportunities)
Giving Voice-Speaking out. This is considered the most dangerous of the four options. Government sponsored death squads or special army units, eliminate opposition leaders and a good portion of their sympathizers. Opposition often leads to torture, prolonged detention, and reprisals against family members.
Resistance becomes violent. It can take several forms, including conspiracy, attempted coups, rebellion, intercommunal war, and the ultimate challenge to state legitimacy, and the right to rule.

I have sought to set out the descent into collapse and anarchy that has begun to face us. I hope that it has had a chilling effect. No amount of spin can change what the experts have already determined is taking place in Guyana. What do we do? No one hearing these words can deny that every stage of the descent is palpably present in Guyana. In fact I make bold to say that we have arrived at stage 4. There is no 5th or lower stage to go to. This is it.

Some Recommendations Applied Elsewhere:
Continuous holding of “free and fair” elections with the intention that these will lead to the establishment of new modes of political competition in which individuals and communal groups attain prospects for gaining access to decision-making and to the distribution of government services. However in a society characterized by strong ethnic and/or religious cleavages elections tend to become no more than censuses through which majorities and minorities become permanent. Equal opportunity for access to decisions and government allocations then become difficult and, as has often been shown in practice, even impossible. Democratic institutions such as elections and parties may not solve the state-strength dilemma in milieu where political programs and identities revolve primarily around social cleavages.”
UN involvement. Many argue that the United Nations is an institution made up of sovereign states and therefore it will be antithetical for the agency to become involved in internal state matters. However the recent trend of involvement as seen in Bosnia, Sudan, East Timor and other states have begun to see a redefined role for the UN
Devolution of Power: There are many models which exist from as close as Suriname, Brazil, and Venezuela, to as far away as Northen Ireland and Sweden. Some have suggested devolution along territorial lines such as Federalism, others speak of power sharing or shared governance which some speak of inclusive democracy.

President’s/Government’s Response:
1. Stakeholders’ Meetings
2. Reaffirmation of Security Plan. We all agree that the plan is a good one for normal functioning of the police force or service little or nothing is encapsulated for the strengthening of the GDF for the “urban warfare” that the Chief of Staff . (Refer to plan)
3. Policy Statements at Babu John to commemorate the death of one of Guyana’s national heroes Cheddi Jagan. (SN 3rd March, 2008)
He further stated that those persons calling for power sharing are saying that they can control these killings if they are part of the government. This, Jagdeo called "a back door way" of trying to seek power.
"Many people would like a back door way to political power, they don't want to take elections or the democratic way,"
He continued that should any government allow itself to be bullied into sharing political power then there is no democratic future for that country neither will there be a brighter future for children.
Our response has to be both collective and constitutional. Merely talking in a room and issuing communiqués though helpful will prove insufficient. My colleague Mr. Khemraj Ramjattan has eloquently articulated that unless there is growth and political space being accorded to all, we will continue to spiral downwards into the morass.

The AFC is ready to be seriously engaged in talks to transform this nation whenever the government feels that it is. We will not attend to hear roll calls of persons killed or about helicopters borrowed or bought.
During my presentation last year I made the following words which I repeat again:

There can be no development without inclusivity, no peace without justice; and no future without cooperation. Guyana cannot afford to experiment further with dogmatic and standard forms of “democracy” where there is a government and loyal opposition. We are just not configured to operate in that manner. We are simply not like other countries and a continued belief or rather pretense that we are, is perhaps our greatest threat. We must accept our differences, and therefore prepare for them. In this regard it is important that we build trust, and begin to share equitably and systemically, the economic and political pie. This is the only way of progressing.

Mr. Speaker time is upon us. We cannot delay or procrastinate or deny our situation. Those who refuse to change course will become the forgotten people of yesterday and imperil the children of tomorrow. We must enter into a new paradigm of democracy and governance and we must do so as a matter of urgency.

In closing I quote two very applicable biblical verses:
“Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.
Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”

(Corinthians Chapter 10, Verses 11 and 12.)