Latest update April 17th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 30, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Speaking at a forum sponsored by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce, Business Minister, Dominic Gaskin, told his listeners that business folks should keep out of politics. The next day, the former head of the Chamber, Vishnu Doerga, told his audience that he disagreed with the Minister and asserted that business people should concern themselves with politics.
Who is right and who is wrong? The Business Minister is wrong. He put it over badly. Doerga is right but his organisation’s record and the mentalities of those who applauded him as he disagreed with the Minister are not admirable things.
Some from the audience shouted, “Well said, well done.” But those who shouted those words were hiding under their mothers’ dresses, trembling with fear when politics went in semi-fascist directions after 2001. And where was Doerga then? I didn’t hear and see him and those who supported his speech saying anything about involvement in politics.
In fact, they were afraid to talk about any political issue of the day. What the Business Minister should have pronounced on is that capitalists should get involved in politics but politics that liberates country and people; politics that uses moral, ethical and philosophical inputs that are requirements for sustaining the soul of a nation; politics that is modern and progressive; politics that practices humanity; politics that has no space for party loyalty and ethnic embrace, only loyalty to humans.
Let’s quote Doerga and afterwards ask him where he and his applauders were when politics was destroying the land. Doerga told his ecstatic audience; “We understand that we’re all in politics… It’s your taxpayers money that funds all of this so that actually means that we’re all involved in politics… You should be running behind [GAFDD Director] Marlon Cole and asking him the list of things you should stop eating and the medicines you should stop consuming when you are sick as well because shouldn’t that be something of concern to you and is that politics?
“If it is where the money is coming from and how we’re being taxed and how it’s being used, then I’ll say yes, do get involved!”
Did Doerga and the Chamber object when NIS money was put into the Berbice Bridge under President Jagdeo? Wasn’t that taxpayers’ money? Was Doerga in Guyana between the years 1997 and 2015 when Georgetown became the filth capital of the world? If people from a foreign land came and saw what Georgetown had become, they would never have believed that Guyana had a Chamber of Commerce, Private Sector Commission and Manufacturing Association.
Why would they have thought so? Because no investor, no capitalist would have wanted to do business in such a putrid environment. I will always maintain that one of the most unforgivable transgressions of both Jagdeo and Ramotar was the destruction that they brought to Georgetown.
I have never despaired in life because of my philosophical make-up but one day I felt extremely sad in my car at the junction of Albert and Lamaha Streets. The garbage was there for months. The stench was terrible. The traffic signal was red for me, so I had to bear the smell. When I looked at it, I really felt Guyana was dead.
Here was the most tragic part. What I saw at that junction was repeated all over Georgetown. Did Mr. Doerga and those who clapped him endure that miasma? Did their children too? So why our business folks weren’t involved in politics then?
The University of Guyana has a direct bearing on our economy. During those very years, I cited above, our only university fell down; not was falling down but fell down. The University’s medical degree was decertified as were the chemistry and biology programmes. UG did not even have working photocopy machines, working toilets, working telephones, printing paper was scarce.
Where was the political voice of our business class? So Doerga tells us that it our tax money that goes into public spending so we are all involved in politics. But there was a strange science at work during the reign of Jagdeo and Ramotar.
Our business folks chose not to get into political discussions. They avoided politics like the plague. Now suddenly, this country is told by one of our business executives that investors by nature need to be politically involved. Well nature deserted our business folks during the Jagdeo presidency.
I can only assume that what Doerga and his applauders mean is that in Guyana, capitalist must seek out political narrative based on which political party and ethnic group are in power. Doerga and his clappers are serious people.
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