Guyanese will not risk our collective prosperity, the future of our country and children

Allright-thinking Guyanese must condemn the move by the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), Tacuma Ogunseye, to call for a return to a state of affairs, which under Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC), saw the targeting – killing and harassment – of, among others, his own WPA members.

It was not so long ago, that the details of Burnham’s regime were recounted in shocking detailed.

For example, one line - “All attacks on WPA activists must be fatal” – according to the International Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the killing of Dr Walter Rodney, was included in PNC documents that were circulated during the 1980’s. Notably, the Commission’s report concluded Rodney’s assassination was a “State organised” act that was executed with the knowledge of the then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, who had “large and detailed” knowledge of what was being done by the State and its agencies during his tenure. Relative to the comment, the report details its link to the principle of party paramountcy and the use of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) and Guyana Defence Force (GDF), as well as the judiciary, to go after persons who were seen as opposition elements.

Page 51 of the report noted that Guyana was a “totally controlled society” and Burnham was “well informed and anyone who stepped out of line had to feel his ire.” The report, on page 41, also noted that Burnham in 1974, at a PNC Conference, said, “It was decided that the Party should assume unapologetically its paramountcy over the Government, which is merely one of its executive arms.” Prior to that, according to page 42 of the report, Burnham reasoned that “God says that before you were, I was. The party says to the Government before you were, we were. The government has got to be in our system as a subordinate agency to the party.” In that context, the report notes that the judiciary, the GPF and, particularly, the GDF was used to enforce the wishes of Burnham and his PNC. Page 45 of the report stated that Burnham called for the armed forces to “be fully acquainted with the policies of the PNC party.” As such, page 46 adds that the judiciary and ranks “committed themselves to being servants of the Prime Minister (Burnham), rather than official in service of the State.”

Against this backdrop – the fact that the PNC, under Burnham’s leadership, the Guyana Police Force (GPF) and Guyana Defence Force (GDF), as well as the judiciary, were involved in political acts – it is bewildering that an Executive Member of the WPA, Tacuma Ogunseye, would deign to utter the words he did on March 9, 2023.

The increasingly embattled Ogunseye, at a public meeting in Buxton on March 9, 2023, said: the WPA’s objectives were clear and the first is “to get the African team in a state of battle readiness… the Afro-Guyanese police and soldiers… would stand with Afro-Guyanese in resisting mainly Indo-Guyanese supporting the PPP/C…no government could survive if they don’t have the support of the military and those who carry weapons for the state…once we organise our people and once we begin to fight we will ensure that our brothers and sisters in uniform will do the right thing…a white diplomat pulled me in a corner and he said I don’t understand how people complain that they are oppressed and they are holding guns in their hands. They are the majority in the army, in the police, and they say they are oppressed. What he was saying is our problem is our own making. Our problem is our own making. Anytime we turn those guns in the right direction it is over.”

Ogunseye’s utterances, undeniably, reek of hatred, racist and terrorist rhetoric.

It is a fact that Dr. Walter Rodney, himself, on December 13, 1979, according to declassified documents published by the National Security Archives, rejected such behaviour as “repugnant” and charged that: “The victims of terrorism are always the ones with the least stake in government: low-level police officers, who were assassinated at random; clerks in government offices, who were killed or wounded by exploding bombs; and innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the vicinity of terrorist act.” Access to the National Security Archives and the many declassified document about