Essays

Part I of this collection of essays breaks new ground. Dr. Ramesh Gampat estimates that the value of private wealth in Guyana ranges from a low of US$26.21 billion to a high of US$38.41 billion. The two largest components of private wealth, the stock of buildings and fixed capital formation, account for 84 to 89 percent of total private wealth. Private wealth per person ranges from US$35,000 to US$51,000, which is 5 to 7 times larger than non-oil GDP per capita in 2020. Part II dwells on the foundational years, 1961 to 1968, of the dictatorship by Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham. A memorandum from the recently declassed American files on British Guiana, prepared for the 303 Committee and dated 17 March 1967, stated: “It is established U.S. Government policy that Cheddi Jagan, East Indian Marxist leader of the pro-Communist People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in Guyana, will not be permitted to take over the government of an independent Guyana.” Among other things, the US backed its policy position by supplying funds for covert operation and economic aid. Burnham, who ruled Guyana from 1964 until his death in August 1985, was the consummate opportunist endowed with Machiavellian ambition. Once he was no longer leashed to Britain and the US, he established a totalitarian regime, wrecked the economy, destroyed lives and social norms, and drove thousands of Guyanese away from the country. Part III is devoted to Dr. Cheddi Jagan, his family background, education, ideology and politics. A keen observer of how people lived, worked and played, Jagan searched for dualities and found it everywhere: poverty and exploitation, rich and poor, proletariat and capitalist. His obsession with “Scientific Marxism” was akin to theology: Jagan’s Marxist total illumination enabled him to see both the end and the means to his socialist utopia. Unlike Burnham who was patient, flexible and strategic, Jagan was politically and geo-strategically naïve: his obsession with Marxism blinded him to the fact that little Guyana was no match for the combined might of the US and UK. Cheddi possessed three traits that are dangerous to a politician of any stripe anywhere on the globe: analytical, doctrinaire and impractical (un-strategic). Part IV studies population size, its growth and the Guyanese Diaspora. The country’s population was 7.6 times as big in 2018 as it was in 1831, growing from 98,000 to 744,692. Mean growth during the147 years from 1872 to 2018 was a meager 1 percent, a rate that is likely to persist into the foreseeable future. Dr. Gampat estimates a net Guyanese migrant stock of 628,550 in 2018, which is about 85 percent of the domestic population. More than 70 percent of these migrants are Indian Guyanese. Migration of this magnitude presents a huge obstacle to the country’s development prospects, which the emerging oil industry is now exposing in all its dimensions.