Dear Editor,
Guyanese mark time in relation to national elections. 1953, 1964, 1992, 2020 roll off our tongues, seasoned with tartness of our varied memories. National history becomes confined to the casting of votes and the inevitable skirmish for political power, with victors scripting tales of their own heroism, often labouring to insert themselves as the protagonists of that history. For that reason, September 1, 2025, like other dates before it, will be etched in the ledger of Guyanese time, perhaps in part because some of us share with American essayist, H.L. Mencken, the cynicism that “every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” An exaggerated event from which the government often becomes “a broker in pillage.”
In this context, we may reflect on another September 1. That of 1989 when Dr. Cheddi Jagan received the Frantz Fanon Freedom Award at the third Annual Conference of Central America and the Caribbean in New York. The premise of the conferral being “for extraordinary life-long dedication, self-sacrifice and consistent work leading to the emancipation of the wretched of the earth but especially of the Caribbean and Latin America.”
“The Wretched of the Earth” which belongs to Franz Fanon’s imposing anticolonial oeuvre names the poor, the dispossessed, the dehumanized of the Third World who grapple with the onslaught of colonialism, not as past events, nor only external assault, but also an internal contagion, one thriving in the petri dish of local elite maneuvers and transactions. Those, for instance, that speak of state complicity with oil multinationals, an alliance of Fanon’s “nationalist bourgeoisie” or state elites and foreign elites, carving and defending PSAs that are inimical to the interests of the “masses” or citizens. Or the awarding of mining, public procurement and other concessions to local elites, the result of which can produce casually boastful assertions that GY$40 million is a meagre sum, even as many Guyanese lament food prices, wages, and social stagnation amidst oil windfalls and elite enrichment.
Fanon reminds us that this is a society of yawning socioeconomic inequalities and oppressions, where these elites represent a “bourgeois caste,” one that lacks the inventiveness to build the nation but specializes in “opportunism” and “activities of the intermediary type” that yield “commissions.” The “loot,” as Fanon observes, are invested not in the country, but in the developed North, where the bourgeois caste have a habit of vacationing. Using the single party-system that coerces obedience, the bourgeoisie unite around a powerful leader to stabilize the system of exploitation and patronage. As such, Fanon sees a society where national independence is disemboweled and national consciousness is “nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell,” a world where national sovereignty is expunged by the unbridled bourgeois “spirit of money-making” and decadence. Published in 1963, “The Wretched of the Earth,” prophesies the crudities of the Guyana petro-state, “the immoderate money-making of the bourgeois caste, and its widespread scorn for the rest of the nation.”
In his acceptance speech, Dr. Jagan was as caustic as Fanon, identifying this caste as “parasitic elite[s],” they who “are living parasitically on the bulk of the people.” He lamented increasing levels of poverty in which “10% of the people at the top earned 40% of the national income,” cautioning that the “maldistribution of income will worsen by 1995.” The notion of the “prosperity gap” is recent, and not commonly addressed in exultant economic discourses of oil GDP growth etc., and Guyana is notorious for its absence in global poverty and inequality data (https://scorecard.worldbank.org/en/data/indicator-detail/SI_POV_DDAY_TO?orgCode=ALL&refareatype=REGION&refareacode=ACW&age=_T&disability=_T&sex=_T[1]). However, the “IDB Group Country Strategy With the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (2023-2026)” underscores that poverty levels in Guyana (US$5.50 per day) were “relatively stable” at 42.3%. Considering that the average for the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region was 22.6% in 2018, one can decipher the grimness or moderateness of “relatively stable.”
Dr. Jagan’s computation of economic inequality finds an eerie parallel in the present, where according to the “Review of Financial Development and Inclusion for Guyana: Assessment and Options for Reform (2020),” it was found that “income distribution is highly skewed toward the wealthiest” and that “income distribution in Guyana suggests considerable inequality.” Guyanese would contend that no rigorous economic research is required to unearth that lived reality, but delving further, the report finds “a share of national income held by the richest 20 percent of the population of 42 percent.” The World Inequality Database reveals that for period 1995-2023, the top 10% share of wealth was 63.3% whereas that for the bottom 50% was 3.5% (https://wid.world/country/guyana/[2]). UNICEF’s “Country Office Annual Report 2023 Guyana and Suriname” estimates Guyana’s Gini coefficient at 48% (100 being most equal) and declaring it “among the most unequal worldwide.” Interestingly, as the report notes, that was the same year “Guyana’s economic status was reclassified by the World Bank from an upper-middle-income to a high-income country.”
While the IDB Group places unemployment at 15.2 % in 2021, it does not account for child poverty (0-17 years), which the “2023 Multidimensional Poverty Index: Guyana” registers at an alarming 48-49%, a similar figure cited by UNICEF in 2016 (https://guyanatimesgy.com/unicef-finds-47-5-of-children-under-16-living-in-poverty-in-guyana/[3]). Indeed, while the masses bleed under bourgeois deal-making and prodigality, the intensity of hardships afflict more the Indigenous Peoples, who according to the “UNICEF Guyana Annual Report 2024” belong to “the poorest wealth quintile.” This is buttressed by UNICEF’s 2017 “Study on Indigenous Women & Children in Guyana” which affirms that these peoples “experience poverty at twice the rate and sometimes even five times more than the non-indigenous populations” with regions 1, 7, 8 and 9 recording poverty rates of 80%, 61%, 94% and 74% respectively in 2006. Recognizing that there exists a positive relationship between destitution and educational attainment, it is not surprising that as the state eulogizes educational achievements, the Indigenous communities are relegated into near obscurity. Preoccupied with a fetish for “top 1 percenters,” the state trotted out multicoloured charts of historic regional achievements at the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA), ironically revealing the numerical and social disparities that beset the First Peoples. Such privations appear to be normalized, for as the article announces “Guyana’s best results ever” it also rationalizes the absence of Indigenous students from the glamorized charts: “No pupil from Regions Seven, Eight, or Nine—Guyana’s hinterland regions—made it into the top 1% this year and, therefore, did not secure a spot at Queen’s College. Usually, few students from these regions are part of the top 1%…” (https://newsroom.gy/2025/08/13/ngsa-2025-a-closer-look-at-guyanas-best-results-ever/). Notwithstanding the ongoing brutalities of mining (often state-sanctioned) and the resultant contamination, social crises and institutional neglect, the de facto “wretched” of the wretched of an independent and self-aggrandizing Guyana would be no other than the Indigenous Peoples.
Though Dr. Jagan does not identify this historically oppressed and dispossessed group in his speech, he notes the causative agents of such gross inequities and suffering: “This is the misery to which puppet rule and turncoats and traitors have put our country.” He further pinpoints the roots in colonial racial capitalism that underpin Western “models of development.” These models, which he says are “exported to us in the name of development” serve to “tie us down” by which he means luring us into a “debt trap” and a state of “economic dependency.” Interestingly, he identifies the emphasis on infrastructure as the route to such subjugation, one mediated by the bourgeois caste, who become the “puppets” for colonialism. In such a dispensation, he shares the Fanonian belief that “sovereignty goes, political independence goes, economic independence goes and you will get tied up even militarily and ideologically with the outside world.” As US warships descend on the Caribbean and South America once again, on the pretext of exterminating drug trafficking, Dr. Jagan at the said ceremony encourages us to see “drugs, debt and dependency” as interconnected, tied to a familiar imperial specter.
What an interesting circle time re-inscribes as Guyanese saunter to the polls. Anxious for change, a chance to exit the parasitic and profiteering orbit of elite pacts in 2025 even as gunboat diplomacy recall 1953. So what’s the solution? Both Dr. Jagan and Fanon urge consciousness-raising, which no doubt requires the awareness of colonialism, not as past event, but enduring aggression against the people in altered forms. Dr. Jagan, of course, clamoured for democracy—free and fair elections—but Fanon is firmer, demanding that “the bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find conditions necessary for its existence and its growth” for “it is good for nothing.” Unless the latter is enforced by the people, the common people, democracy would be rendered useless, nothing but “the worship of Jackals by Jackasses” as Mencken would say, the marking of circular time.