BREAKING ALL FRONTIERS
IT is incumbent upon all national leaders to pursue the primary objective of transforming the unity of celebration of Christmas to transcend this one day and impregnate the continuous processes of endeavour and development. This must be done as a priority if this nation is to withstand natural and global forces that make our country’s survival, and the quality of our survival, vulnerable to external forces.
Our freedom is subjective, dependent on the not-so-tender mercies of the international power-brokers, who use Third World Countries as pawns on their chessboards in their eternal quest for resource-acquisition and domination.
The ostensible conference of freedom with the granting of the instruments of independence was a mere symbolic gesture, because constitutional delinquency then prevailed and the seven years development plan (see Dr. Jagan’s West on Trial for details) depended heavily on support from Britain, which never quite relinquished its stranglehold on this nation’s economy, thus compromising its autonomy.
Kwame Nkrumah, defining neo-colonialism and the subjective independence granted to colonized countries in his book ‘Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Colonialism’ states: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system, and thus its political system is directed from outside.”
Liberty is relative. When we are not allowed by those who have orchestrated themselves into guardians of this country’s purse-strings to determine the processes of this country’s revenue-management, then that subjectivity is comparable to national captivity, equating a Government and its people to mere pawns on an internationally-scaled economic chessboard.
Economic domination by foreign powers and resultant national subservience as the Guyanese workforce bends its knees before the inhuman conditionalities of external funding agencies, to which the human factor is an entirely negligible quotient in their fiscal programmes, ostensibly targeting human development, is irony indeed.
Factored into this equation are the forces fighting to divide this nation in primary pursuit of agendas configured toward self-aggrandisement.
So the Guyanese nation remains, in many ways, divided unto itself, blind to the reality that true freedom, economic and otherwise, does not fructify from destruction of the production systems, the infrastructural networks, and the social construct, but rather from a unity of purpose to reach a common goal – the goal of a nation united in the struggle for a liberated economy, which is the primary factor that would eventuate in national prosperity and optimum social development.
It is only when this nation has broken the shackles of economic dependency can we realise our potential as a truly free people, with all the resultant implications, all resonating with upward-spiraling mobility and indicators.
Centuries after giving Socrates hemlock that nation still carries the stigma, but the ideas that that great philosopher expounded soars over the centuries and into the minds and souls of the world’s greatest thinkers.
Enchaining our potential for true freedom – a liberated economy, freedom of expression – in effect all the freedoms that constitute democracy, would forever keep us a captive nation.
Slavery and domination are relative, and to be a truly free people we need to allow the concept of unity and peace inherent in the spirit of Christmas to prevail over our prejudices and myopia so that we can break all frontiers in our development dimensions.
extracted from the Guyana Chronicle