GUYANA | Workers Bearing the Cost of Poverty and Political Exclusion

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, December 14, 2025 - The 2025 Inter-American Development Bank report on Ten Findings about Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed statistics that many already knew, many sought to highlight, and which this regime, along with forces sympathetic to it, worked overtime to hide.

In addition to the poverty (58 percent) and abject poverty (32 percent) breakdown, the report also highlights the demographics most affected.

A nation and its people cannot develop in an atmosphere of lies, the violation of rights, and the rule of law. There must be universally accepted principles that bind all, so that all may thrive and be held accountable.

For years, yours truly, along with others, has been drawing attention to the policies of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) that are forcing African Guyanese, who traditionally gravitate toward the public service, teaching, nursing, mining, and the disciplined services, deeper into poverty.

Yours truly is on record describing these policies as “economic genocide” based on the United Nations Genocide Convention, which speaks to “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Other organisations, including International Decade for People of African Descent Assembly – Guyana (IDPADA-G), the Guyana Caribbean Institute for Democracy (GCID), and individuals such as attorney at law Nigel Hughes, have documented the evidence and presented it to the United Nations and members of the United States Congress.

The Joe Biden Kamala Harris administration called on the Jagdeo/Ali regime to pursue shared prosperity of the nation’s wealth and to promote inclusionary democracy, which is a stated political objective under Article 13 of Guyana’s Constitution. Instead of action, we witnessed a regime on the offensive, attacking all who dared to speak while denying glaring evidence of discrimination.

A close reading of the report section titled ‘How does poverty affect specific groups’ revealed that “Afro descendants, Indigenous people, and children are all between eleven and fifteen percentage points more likely to be poor than the overall population. Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean is not only unevenly distributed across geographic areas, it also affects particular groups differently. Across the groups for which we have data available, we find rates higher than that of the general population among Indigenous people and Afro descendants.”

Most African Guyanese have been socialised, rightly or wrongly, into public service by their employment choices. This reality means the government plays a decisive role in determining conditions of work through engagement with trade unions in collective bargaining and in setting the minimum wage.

The Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) has repeatedly called on the government to address real wages in light of the state of the economy, the erosion of wages and salaries, and the government’s capacity to respond positively. The Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) has endorsed this position and is on record calling for a review of the wage and salary bands. All of this has fallen on deaf ears.

Yours truly have written ad nauseam about the disparity in the treatment of bauxite workers compared to sugar workers, a practice that began under the PPP regime. Bauxite Company Guyana Incorporated (BCGI) was not shuttered because the product lacked value on the international market. It was shuttered because African Guyanese primarily worked in the industry and, rather than addressing grievances that spanned more than a decade, including the failure to correctly compensate workers for termination benefits, the regime chose abandonment.

We witnessed the dismantling of a pension plan valued in excess of $2.5 billion. Efforts by workers, through their trade unions, to convert those funds into an investment vehicle were blocked by the PPP regime. At the time, this represented the single largest pool of funds owned by an African dominated workforce. Even as that plan was dismantled, the state invested billions to protect the sugar workers pension plan, an industry dominated by East Indian Guyanese. These are the facts.

Meanwhile, there remains a section of society that continues to peddle the myth that the race is lazy and without ambition. History exposes that lie. African Guyanese were economic pioneers, buying plantations and converting them into villages, establishing the first mass-based economy through cooperatives and the Village Movement, staffing the public sector on which the economy hinges, and pioneering the private sector from gold mining and village shops to tailoring and opening the interior. The evidence is overwhelming.

African Guyanese, particularly their leaders, have never sought to deny any group participation in the economy. The grievance has always been the demand for justice and fair play. That demand can only be met in an enabling environment that promotes equity and equality, grounded in need and affirmative action to correct historical wrongs.

The Indigenous community, according to the same report, is also suffering. I respect the right of their leaders to articulate their reality, and I stand in solidarity with them, as I do with every oppressed group and individual. We cannot continue to live under these conditions.

While some seek to deny the reality by pointing to a handful of African Guyanese who have crossed over to the PPP, or who bow for economic survival, not a week goes by without stories of individuals being awarded contracts or placed  in positions of authority yet having no influence over decision making or control over sourcing materials for their businesses. I have also heard repeatedly that contributions to the PPP war chest are required to secure contracts.

These realities cannot be denied or wished away. They must be confronted.

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