Condolences to the family and friends of Ronaldo Peters and Keon Fogenay who were shot and killed by the police while protesting in Linden, and 11-year-old Adrianna Younge who disappeared at the Double Day Hotel at Tuschen only to turn up apparently drowned the next day in the very pool that had apparently been searched just after her disappearance.
The police had to retract information given to the public that Adrianna was seen leaving the hotel in a vehicle, and her disappearance and death led to protests and disturbances in many parts of the country. The looting of businesses and the shooting and killing of peaceful Linden protesters was reminiscent of the ethnic disturbances of the 1950s and 1960s, and the ethnic composition of the protesters suggests that those doing electoral calculations should begin right there.
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) presented a petition to parliament calling for an international enquiry into all aspects of the Guyana Police Force (GPF). But as anticipated in Guyana’s autocratic setting, the Speaker of the National Assembly rejected the petition. The GHRA is urging all Guyanese at home and abroad to add their names to its petition, noting that ‘the preference of the ruling party appears to be to remove and reduce opportunities for civilised politics. … Rather than encourage citizens to vent their grievances by this democratic procedure, the Speaker and the ruling party he represents appear to prefer social unrest on the streets.’ (SN: 01/05/2025).
Much of what we have recently witnessed are the inadvertent results of the PPP, by way of its policy of ethnic/political dominance, wrapping itself in unintended consequences (UC): the products of the social actions of persons but especially governments. UC focuses our attention on the perverse and unanticipated effects of formal and informal policies, legislation, regulations, etc. While social science has recognised and usually accounts for this sorun, it is normally ignored by social media interventions and politicians focused upon immediate results. A long time ago, Robert K. Merton identified five sources of unanticipated consequences, every one of which applies to the PPP.
The most common sources of UC are ignorance and error, which, as noted above and sympathetically interpreted, inform the PPP’s practise of democratic parliamentary governance. The third is ‘wilful ignorance’, where one wants a specific outcome so badly, one purposefully chooses to ignore the unintended effects. I said last week that coalition agreements in Guyana have been rooted in a particular politically virulent expression of race/ethnicity that is still alive today and will not be quelled by the persistent practise of ignoring what this means.
The fourth is ‘basic values,’ e.g. wanting racial/ethnic political domination and peaceful equitable development in the ethnic and governance context of Guyana. Finally, there is the ‘self-defeating prediction,’ e.g. a government’s claim that they are working to bring wellbeing to all Guyanese when its policies are leading to largescale migration even of its own supporters.
‘One Guyana’ is a particular expression of a surveillance state that is specifically directed at the other two substantial ethnic groups: Africans and Amerindians. The general idea is to disadvantage them and subvert their leadership to herd them into the ranks of the PPP.
Given their numerical strength and historical political antagonism towards the PPP, there is not a single area in African social life that the PPP, in one way or another, has not sought to dominate, suppress and undermine: Linden and Georgetown city councils, the Guyana Trades Union Congress, the public service and teachers’ unions, the International Decade for the People of African Descent (Guyana), etc.
Taking an example from Stalinist communism, the ruling oligarchy has established ‘political commissars’ in almost every important social institution over which it has control. A good example of the surveillance state in ‘One Guyana’ is that instead of encouraging the establishment of localised ‘one stop’ arrangements to ease the burden upon the local population, one must fulfill some thirteen, national and local, requirements to get permission to host an event/wedding ceremony in a Neighbourhood Democratic Council area!
Generally, as identified above, a major unintended consequence of its focus upon subverting the political will of Africans is that the PPP cannot create and sell to its own constituents the prospect of Guyana becoming a safe, prosperous democratic environment, and so they migrate. The result is that it must find other ways to hold on to office and herein lies its objections to biometrics, verification of voter addresses, a new voters list or any project that is likely to obstruct the massive voter impersonation and election fraud in which it is involved. The result is that by a recent reputable poll commissioned by the International Republican Institute, only about 22% of the voting population are certain that the regime is legitimate!
At the micro level of the ‘political commissar’, the interest of the party takes precedence over the public interest and since they may conflict, e.g. where the interest of the party does not fit within the olağan processes of the law, immediate improvisation and many errors are made. The original report that Adrianna Younge took off in a vehicle appears to be one of these.
Furthermore, if one goes to every extreme to protect and promote employees who shoot protestors or are allegedly involved in other wrongdoing, one will create more such persons with the unintended consequence of some of them becoming more reckless in their attempt to get your attention and be rewarded with great wealth.
The socialisation process of the PPP’s surveillance state that gives priority to the party interest and loyalty makes it appropriate for us to show some sympathy for the misguided Sergeant Philbert Kendall who has been charged with the murders of Ronaldo Peters and the policemen who were first responders at the Double Day Hotel and are now under close arrest. They are the creations of the PPP’s politics of ethnic/political dominance.
One can call them scrapeheads and perhaps they are confused, but they are but another dysfunctional product of three decades of PPP rule. In its drive to impoverish Africans, the regime has not only severely reduced the income of public servants (the USA 2025 international narcotics control strategy report observed that the poor income of public servants is partly responsible for the police being the weak link in the drug enforcement process), but has annually camouflaged the education results, as it also did in the 1950s and 1960s, by celebrating the dozen or so persons who did well.
Today families have become relatively poorer, less educated and are deliberately being socialised in all manner of secondary and marginal activities, and the result is that society must contend with the numerous ‘scrapeheads’ the PPP has produced.
The PPP and its trolls cannot hide their political discriminatory strategy under the guise that similar things may have happened to Africans elsewhere. True, where the historical economic class structure is not sufficiently attenuated similar results are possible. But added to this, what is taking place in Guyana is political and deliberate, and given the ethnic context, is likely to cultivate a more severe backlash. ‘Nearly all theorists of social movements identify relative rather than absolute deprivation, as the leading cause of revolution and rebellion’ (Encyclopedia.com).