Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 30, 2013 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Is the international community ganging up on Guyana? Has there been, as a consequence, an overemphasizing of governance and corruption? And do these actions indicate some form of conspiracy against the incumbent PPPC administration.
There is appreciable justification for the PPPC to be taken aback by the degree to which a recent conference on investment in Guyana was dominated by lectures from foreign elements about the need for Guyana to improve its framework on governance and combating corruption.
The government is understandably concerned and surprised that the conference seemed to have been detoured away from its original objective and transformed into a forum to lecture the administration on the need for reforms related to improving transparency.
This surprise felt by the PPPC government is of course symptomatic of a deeper malaise that afflicts the ruling party. It has, since 1997, been generally unresponsive to concerns which have cast its governments in a bad light. It has always been in denial about corruption within the government and has been unwilling to concede ground if reforms can be interpreted as being indicative of mistakes or failures on its part.
There is, for example, a perception that official corruption is widespread. From the public pronouncements of the government, it can be assumed that it concedes that there is corruption, but that both the scale and impact are being exaggerated for political gain by the opposition.
There is good reason for the PPPC to feel that too much is being made of corruption, notwithstanding its admission that some corruption exists. After all, if you look at the record of the PPPC in government, it has been the success story of the Caribbean when it comes to economic growth. The PPPC’s record on growth and development can hardly be criticized.
The opposition has failed, over the past twenty years, to develop a critique of the model of development pursued by the government. In fact, one is led to suspect that given the opportunity to administer the country, the opposition parties would pursue the same policies that are informed by the Washington Consensus. You hardly, for example, hear the opposition parties calling for a more working class orientation by the government. There is a total anathema to the use of the world socialism from within the opposition camp.
Economic development for them, as it is for the government, is about boosting foreign investment and about wholesale commitment to private sector development. Where, it needs to be asked, is the alternative to the neo-liberal approach? There is none within the opposition camp.
When the opposition parties therefore go to the electorate they are in effect asking the people of Guyana to vote for them not because they will pursue a different course, but because they feel they can do a better job.
In establishing that they can do the same things better, they have to find a basis for asking the people to choose them and therefore latch on to issues of transparency and corruption. They make hay over these issues because ideologically it is on the same plane with the government. They have no alternative vision and therefore will offer no different approach to the economy if either assumes power.
And in the face of the spectacular performance of Guyana’s economy and the opposition parties’ own limitations in critiquing economic growth in Guyana, the only lifeline that the opposition parties have to show that they will do better is to paint the PPPC administration as being mired in corruption.
But even here they have failed abysmally and have only of recent recognized that the real problem is of class nature. The dilemma that the opposition faces is that while it may now recognize that a new and powerful economic class has emerged, one that feasts on the resources of the State, it too runs the risk of producing its own oligarchic class should it assume power. It has long been known that just as how the PPPC has its friends who are within the powerful oligarchic class, so too there are elements in waiting should the opposition take power.
Today, the concern may be about the massive injection of funds being provided by China to the present administration. But will that be different should the opposition parties gain power? Or will China be replaced by Taiwan as the major foreign investor in Guyana?
Undoubtedly there is corruption and a need for improved transparency. But it could equally be argued that there is a greater need for the country to shift its ideological orientation, because inherent in the neo-liberal model of development is that very risk of venality which the PPPC is being accused of pursuing with such an open appetite.
To be continued next week.
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