TRANSCRIPT OF ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT CHEDDI JAGAN AT TRAVELODGE HOTEL, TORONTO, CANADA -- OCTOBER 30, 1996

(Transcript from amateur video)

I am very happy to be here this evening to have this opportunity to see so many of you and to bring you up-to-date with some of the things we are doing. Actually, we are celebrating our fourth anniversary in government but, equally important this year, is the 50th anniversary of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) which was formed in 1946. (applause)

At that time we were all very young and were ready to storm the heavens. My wife and I were two of four - the two others were Ashton Chase and Joycelyn Hubbard. What is significant about that four is that we represented virtually all the racial groups in Guyana: Indian, Black, White and Mixed--what we call "Red Man". (crowd laughter)

And perhaps even more important, we were all li link ed to the labor movement. I was in the sugar workers' union. In 1945 I became treasurer; my wife was working with women in the clerical workers' union; Ashton Chase was a young man then, in Critchlow's union; and Joycelyn Hubbard was secretary of the Trades Union Council.

And the third important thing about this was we wanted to bring an end to colonial domination which had pauperized our country, exploited it, and a few years later we saw where we had the last shooting of sugar workers in the days of slavery and indentureship.

The fourth objective was to form a political party and to attain political power to transform Guyana. And that came sooner than we had expected. We formed the party in the 1950s and perhaps because of our educational work, or agitation and so forth, we were able to come to power in 1953. (Maybe the wrong word, not "power" but in "office"); and perhaps because of being in office and not power, Churchill sent troops four and a half months after, and we were out. And then came, of course, jailing and detention and restriction and what not and an engineered split in our party in 1955. And that was indeed the greatest tragedy in our country.

We won again the elections, as was pointed out, in 1957 and again in 1961 - three consecutive elections despite all the harassment against us. And then when they (the British) could not defeat us - these so-called advocates of democracy - when they couldn't defeat us in the old system, they engineered a new system called Proportional Representation, and in that way they maneuvered us out of the government in 1964.

I was happy to see in April 1990, the author of that manoeuver, who was then President Kennedy's number one adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., saying at the Nation magazine in New York that he was sorry for what he did thirty years before and that a great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan. But I remarked, "not to Cheddi Jagan but Guyana and the people of Guyana." (applause)

Then, of course, we all know the most recent history of twenty-eight years of the PNC-UF coalition, starting with the coalition and then absolute power by the PNC from 1968 onwards, and the wreckage of Guyana which you are fully aware of too. That is what led to perhaps the vast majority of you being over here and in so many other countries.

When the first free and fair elections came in 1992, this time not even the PR system could stop us from winning. We got 54 percent of the votes - perhaps a little higher because some little frauds here and there were committed. (laughter) We has a higher percentage than in 1964 when we had 46 percent. And I remember when I was being sworn in on October 9, I said that we are going to make a new beginning. By the way that was the exact date when Churchill sent in troops to remove our Government 1953 - October 9. But I said we will now make a new beginning from where we left off. And that's what we have done, and as you have heard from Dr. Lakhan about the achievements of our Government. And this is remarkable, not because we say so but you have independent sources - the World Ba link , the IDB, United Nations, UNICEF, UNDP, European Union, and the two last American Ambassadors, and so on.

I would say that in this period - the last few years especially - a crisis is weakening the world, and the top leaders cannot find answers to the peoples' problems. We have to work within that system in a sense. Whether we like it or not we had to sign an IMF agreement. We needed US$45million balance of payments support per year, therefore we had to sign. But as we said in our (Party) Congress document a couple years ago, that we have to work carefully and skillfully between conformism and transformation. To conform with the IMF medicine, which includes all kinds of things like privatization, devaluation, deregulation, wage freeze, credit squeeze, and now, globalization and liberalization. To go down that road is sure death - death for the country and for politicians and people like us.

Therefore we have to transform and this is very difficult in the context of what we inherited: a wrecked economy, a wrecked physical infrastructure, sixty percent of the people below the poverty line, over thirty percent unemployed, and more under-employed, and a vast drain of the brain of Guyana and leaving an administrative incapacity; and last but not least, a debt burden per capita perhaps the highest in the world.

In the first year in the Government, 80 percent of the revenue we collected was for debt payment and 50 percent of our foreign exchange was going towards eliminating debt, and so this was indeed a tremendous burden. As I put it at one time: we were given a basket to fetch water. But nevertheless, we have made quite significant improvement, not just in growth in the economy. For instance, Chile under Pinochet had high growth rate but there was no social justice. We have been able to have high growth rate with equity, social justice and ecological preservation.

We feel that the purpose of Government, as the American Constitution says, is not only to have life and liberty, but also happiness and we know that there are many countries of the world where they have high growth rates; but the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer.

I have said that if you want to have high growth rates, we need national cohesion and national unity; to create a national democratic state which will fight to preserve the interest of the nation, because today, either with direct intervention or indirect intervention, sovereignty is imperilled and endangered and therefore we have to protect the future of the nation. We went through the period of colonization, and we know of many countries years after getting independence - they have suffered under colonialization and they are still suffering today. We therefore have to have national cohesion and have all classes and strata, cooperating to save the nation and its people from marginalisation.

In this era of fierce competition and production by computers and robots, nations and people can become marginalized, especially under the pressure to open up the markets, open up the doors, remove all barriers, tendency towards free trade, whereby all we will be doing is importing goods produced from outside.

So it is necessary, as I said, to bring about the broadest possible unity in order to protect the interest of the nation. And this is why I said not only to bring about a new beginning when I was sworn in but we want to come back to the spirit of 1953. (Applause)

In 1953 when we won 18 out of 24 seats, this was a reflection of national unity. Everybody was committed. We didn't say like in Africa "Uhuru! Uhuru!"-- just shouting slogans. We talked about social, economic development, we talked about how colonialism hindered (development) and caused underdevelopment in our country. It bred it and caused suffering and impoverishment. And we saw development in those terms. No doubt this is why we were attacked.

But any way, our objective now to see that we have cohesion, and that we have the interest of the nation protected and, as I said, to come back to the spirit of 1953 when we had that big victory: national unity, racial unity and working people's unity. Then the main trade unions in the country were backed by leaders of our party; the Trade Union Congress was backing us and the Indian and African two major race groups and others were totally involved in that process. And that is what we are bringing back, because not only was there suffering under the last regime, but there was discrimination - political and racial discrimination in the society and we had the country being torn apart.

So this is our objective, but, as I said, it is not easy to reconstruct. I remember once going to Cuba and talking to some military personnel involved in the guerrilla warfare, and they said that they though that the hardest thing was to get power when they were fighting in the jungle, but having won power they realised now that the hardest thing is to reconstruct the country, because Batista had wrecked that country like how our country was wrecked.

Also I remember another story about Cuba. Fidel Castro was going to a hotel and as he was about to enter this man opened the door and he recognised him as an old friend from the guerrilla warfare days.

He said, "Comrade, what are you doing here?"

The man replied, "Well, the Revolution gave me this job."

And he was aghast. Now, there was that great man who sacrificed so much, with so many of their comrades killed, and here he is now, a doorman. Meaning that when a country is wrecked, not only economically but socially, culturally and every other way, they do not have the skills to do the job. When Fidel Castro expressed concern, what he meant was this comrade having made so much sacrifice, maybe he should be holding a different post.

And you know what happened to Guyana, what we are experiencing in the process for reconstruction. Mention was made about privatization. Yes, the last Government committed the country to that course and we have to honour some of that, but I would like to say that we have a position on that: if we have to we would; if we don't have to we would not. If we have to, we will. And this has to do with finance and other factors and question of the workforce.

If you privatize the things right away, quickly, the first thing the people who take over an entity from the State (do) is to have a red ( a red or a black line?) at the bottom to dismiss people. And our job is not to dismiss but to create more jobs. We have to be careful that we do not have the seeds of discontent... (Mangled tape, no voice)... we don't have situations where in order to get power people create strife and turmoil and riot.

Newspaper and the media play a big role in that, inciting. Today we have the same thing happening in the print media and particularly in the television (we have six or seven channels, only one state-owned which is not performing well in, fact). So here is a problem which confronts many developing countries which want to see change come about, and when you try to do that, there are those who, with vested interests, do not want to see any change and they resort to a lot of propaganda, lies and half truths. This is daily being spewed against our Government.

Take, for example, the last elections in 1992. Mr. Hoyte had two pla link s - race and ideology. The usual political propaganda is that the PPP is an Indian party. We are not an Indian party. The Americans and others and the British did not remove us because we are an Indian party. Why were they promoting other Indians like Lionel Luckhoo and there are so many other Indians who came along.

And by the way, let me say that the Indians do not support me because I am an Indian, if you analyzed what happened in Guyana. They supported me because we fought for those who were oppressed and exploited...(prolonged applause).

The bulk of the sugar workers were Indians. It was always so. In the days of slavery, they were mostly Africans; but the time came when they left after slavery was abolished, and Indians took over, and when their farms and settlements were ruined they went back to work in the sugar plantations. And we had all that exploitation which I told you erupted from time to time, and workers were killed, the last in 1948 with the Enmore Martyrs.

I aligned myself from the time I got back with the sugar workers union. I was, as I told you, Treasurer in 1945. In Essequibo when sugar departed, local landlords took over and like the princes of India, they were collaborators against the freedom movement in India. They were not only landlords. They were money lenders, and shop keepers, rice millers. We used to call them the octopus. And, by the way, most of them were Indians and most of the tenants were Indians too. Farmers started their (rice) crop in debt and ended up in debt every year. That was the cycle, and we went and fought against them.

There were the League of Coloured People for Black people, and the East Indian Association, before the PPP came on the scene. There was no political party. And some of these same people were leaders of the East Indian Association. They were not interested in the ordinary working Indian; they were only interested in themselves and they got into battle with them, and I remember my wife defeating one of them on two occasions on the Essequibo Coast. His name was Deroop Maraj.

The Dean of Canterbury in England used to call some Christians, "Sunday Christians". Well, he (Maraj) was a "Sunday Hindu": whole week he would rob the farmers and on Sunday he would put on his dhoti and khurta, go to church and take the flock that he exploited whole week and pray for their souls on Sunday. (laughter). And we had to fight against that!

And so if the rice farmers supported me and the PPP, it is not because I am an Indian but because we have stood over the years for them. Why didn't they support Lionel Luckhoo? Why didn't they support Jainarine Singh? Why didn't they support Latchmansingh? Why didn't they support Balram Singh Rai? Some of them were more famous than I was. Nobody knew me when I went back in 1943 to Guyana - not a soul! Luckhoo came from a very prestigious family but he was not representing the interest of the ordinary working people.

Anyway, I am departing from the theme I was developing that the PPP is not an Indian party, and the British and the Americans did not remove me and put Burnham in because of race. In fact, if they were using race I should have been kept there and Burnham should have been kept out forever because, as we know, Black people are generally in the lowest scale of the social ladder.

So this is one of the problems which we still have to deal with, and the propaganda is still there, that we are an Indian party. This was said by Hoyte in the 1992 elections, that when we came in that Black people will be discriminated against wholesale. Well, fortunately we do not see any turmoil, and racial disharmony because we have not done anything like that despite the charges of discrimination.

By the way at a meeting of the Public Service Unions of the Caribbean, when Patrick Yarde, the head of the Public Service Union, began to peddle the same propaganda, and said that the workers are not getting a decent wage, I made the point that what we have done for the working class has not been done probably in any country, even the developed ones. When you look at the direct benefits we have given ( and I don't have time to recite all of that) this is true especially in terms of wages and salaries and rate of inflation. I have said on the question of wages and salaries and inflation that Brazil and Israel had at one time a situation where they indexed wages and salaries to inflation, and every time inflation goes up, every six months, they would adjust their wages and salaries to accommodate the rate of inflation. They abandoned that. In the first three years we went far ahead; inflation was 40 percent, but we had 134 percent increase in salaries, and so many other things which I do not have time to recite tonight.

On the question of discrimination, I said at the same meeting that if you have allegations of discrimination, if you have cases, there is Dr Henry Jeffrey, the Minister of Labour who at one time belonged to the PNC Executive. Put your case to him! We also have Bishop George, a highly respected individual who heads a Race Relations Task Force. You have Dr (Roger) Luncheon and my wife (Janet Jagan) who represent our party (on the Task Force). You have Eusi Kwayana who represents the WPA.

Mr. Hoyte refused to put a PNC member on that Task Force. Why? Because Bishop George and Bishop Singh were fighting for the restoration of democracy and not only we were attacked but they were attacked, and they (PNC) were against persons like those.

So I said, "You in the opposition now have what rights we never had." The last Government did not sign the Optional Protocol to the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Without signing that Protocol we did not have the right, I say "we", meaning individuals or organizations in Guyana, whatever they may be, to go to the UN Commission on Human Rights to put any case of discrimination, or to invite them to Guyana to investigate it. But we signed it. If we have skeletons in the cupboard, why would we sign it? Or, if we want to practice discrimination, why would we sign it? We signed it and I said, "Don't make propaganda. Go there; invite them to come; put your case to them! We now have the OAS too, as a Human Rights Committee; go to them and ask them to come and investigate!"

I say this because we see we cannot go that road (of discrimination), because all we will be doing is sowing seeds of discord later. You cannot marginalize any section of a country. If you do it, it is going to explode some time or the other.

This accords with the human rights ideas that we have, not just civil and political. As I said at the Miami Summit, when emphasis was put on democracy and free trade, I said, when we talk about democracy, we must talk about human rights, "the pursuit of happiness", as the American constitution says, but not only talk about civil and political rights, but economic, social and cultural rights.

The UN have two Covenants but those two separate sets of rights. But while we do not want to deprive any Guyanese of their civil and political rights we must give them all the other rights - economic, social and cultural rights. We are moving definitely in that direction; that is why we can say in Guyana that we have not only growth in the economy, but social justice, ecological protection and economic development.

We are trying to meet the basic needs of the people. You have heard where we have given out 12,000 house lots. We could have sold them but we gave them away to the poorest people. (Minister) Henry Jeffrey had worked out the yardstick how to determine who should get priority. We have only a little over 2000 acres and we have a further 1000 acres released by the sugar planters, the Guysuco State Corporation, and these in time will be released to the ordinary workers so that they can be provided with shelter as well as food and clothing - the basic needs.

But we want to see cultural development too. I said "man shall not live by bread alone; he needs bread to survive. But bread alone does not make up a full life".

We have taken over The Residence where (Forbes) Burnham (former President) used to live. Mr. Hoyte did not go there after Burnham died. Somebody said that he was afraid of Burnham's jumbie. (laughter) Whether or not it was so, it was closed for seven years, and we have now changed the name from The Residence to Castellani House. Castellani was the original Italian architect who designed it and it is now an Art Gallery. My wife is working with people like Ian McDonald, one of the Fernandes brothers, Rodrigues (one of the architects), Martin Carter (National Poet) and others who are working in that area in order to push us along the road to cultural development in all its aspects.

Sports. You would be glad to know that our Under 19 team in cricket have done very well recently and this is because of the new development taking place. In the field of Education (I do not have the time to tell you all the things we have done), already we are beginning to see results in the CXC and GCE examinations. We are already seeing this.

But more than all of that I thi link we have brought in have given democracy a wider context, not just what Maurice Bishop used to say when he was alive and head of the Government of Grenada, "five-minute" democracy, when you go to the ballot box to vote. Yes, we must have representative democracy by free and fair elections, but more than that we must have consultative democracy, to consult the broadest forces in the society - political parties and other non-governmental organizations so that when we reach a possible consensus we will be able to have implementation and a much faster way and a better way without sabotage and so on.

And last but not least, participatory democracy, where we are empowering the people at the grass roots. As soon as we got in we said that every single community must have citizen committees made up of all the political parties, religious bodies, workers, farmers, trade unions if they are there, farmers' organizations like the Rice Producers' Association, and professional people in the community, and embark on self-help projects on what the community needs. We had that before our time under the PNC too but later on when the funds dried up, Government got into difficulties and they stopped the self-help project because under that scheme the Government would provide the material, and the people would give free labor to work in their communities, and that had lost out.

But more than that we have gone in for what we call "co-management". Gorbachev made a statement once that the reason why the Soviet Union economy went into trouble and stagnation which later on no doubt led to the collapse of communist rule and the world socialist system - he said that you had bureaucratic-command type of Government and bureaucratic-command type of management in state enterprises, etc. We have therefore sought to have democracy at all levels of the party, the PPP, where we debate things endlessly if necessary to arrive at consensus, if not total cohesion in our decision making; and secondly, at the Government level and other spheres you have democracy rooted in our society.

Participatory democracy is essential because we have a lot of state corporations where bureaucrats were doing what they liked. Corruption and bribery was a way of life in the country. Many of them were inefficient because the party card was the basis of getting a job and getting promotion. So things have not done well, and things were not running well. So what have we done now? We allowed the trade unions not only to bargain collectively for wages and salaries but to set up a management committee to sit - to sit with the manager once a month at least. And this applies now at every level  the ferry stellings, the GEC outlets, Guywa outlets, hospitals, health centers.

Everywhere we are appointing these committees drawn up from the citizen committees to sit with the manager in order to get collective decision-making if possible. We can agree that the manager will have individual responsibility; he would have to report to his boss. But he must say why he disagrees with the views put up by the citizens, by the people, who have the right to report to the Minister who looks after that agency and has the responsibility to his political party, PPP/Civic, which in turn monitors to see that our Government people are performing well. Because if they don't perform then we will not have results, neither growth nor anything to distribute to the people at the bottom. So this is a new concept which we have introduced and we are succeeding... (tape garbled)

With regards to corruption and bribery, this has now become a monster in the world, and I noticed that the new World Ba link President said that this is a disease, a cancer, which must be wiped out.

We have in place coming up an integrity law for all Government leaders including the President, and the top Government and civil servants (even going down to the bottom). Because bribery and corruption is a way of life right from the bottom too. We will keep a check on everybody. You have to declare your assets every six months, and we will check to see how they are getting rich (laughter and applause) and how come they are worth so much.

But this will be done not only at that level. The last Government, for instance, for years did not put up a report to the body set up by the Parliament which is headed by the opposition party, that is the one that deals with the public account. For years they had not presented any account. Now every year the accounts by the Auditor General, an independent body, goes to the Parliamentary Committee headed by the Opposition, a new thing also developed by our party.

Last but not least I want to congratulate all of you for helping us. We had support at home, yes. At the political level from five parties in the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy; at the Church level with the two Bishops playing the key role in the Guyana Council of Churches; at the trade union level especially with the seven unions which led to the demise of the PNC control of the trade union movement in 1985 and resulted a big turn in the ra link s of Afro-Guyanese away from the PNC because of their anti-working class policies. We had the farmers, the women, the youths, all in the fight.

Then outside of Guyana we had associations like the ACG and others in different countries. People like you, if you belonged to the ACG or not, you played a role in one form or the other, one way or another, and gave great assistance to see that our country is returned to democracy.

I want to tha link all of you for that. I want to tha link the friendly Governments - the Canadian Government, the British Government, the American Government who also helped to restore democracy in Guyana. And last but not least I want to say there is much to be done in the reconstruction period. Guyanese have been sending things to schools, hospitals and so on back home.

Recently, at Berbice High School I was there when Dr. Singh from Midland, Texas (he had helped our Attorney General to get a serious operation with five bypass. If he had gone to maybe Miami or some other private place it would have cost him forty to fifty thousand dollars, and Dr Singh was able to get it done at not more than ten thousand dollars, and he is now very healthy). But that is not the main thing I want to speak about him. He helped Berbice High School in New Amsterdam, first with minor things like building a fence, repairing the school, and now he is donating computers with a computer library built, and then each classroom will have a video screen, recorder and tapes with educational information, so when the teachers are absent, or some classes may not have teachers, because we do not have adequate numbers of them, they can adopt this as a new teaching method. So we are having people like Dr Singh who is helping us in this very difficult time in order to get over our problems.

I have a letter the other day and this individual is not a Guyanese. He said, "I admire the things you have done over the years. I am an American and to show my solidarity with you I am going to take my money from the American ba link s in America and send it to your ba link s in Guyana. (applause) It will help your balance of payment problems."

So here it is! There's lots more you can do. I do tha link you for what you are doing, and I do hope that we can organize effectively in Canada to see that more can be done. Look at China, for instance. I understand most of the money going to China is coming from overseas Chinese who have done well abroad, and they are wonderful entrepreneurs in different countries, and their savings and their efforts are now being used to rebuild their homeland. Therefore, I would like to conclude by saying "tha link you very much". And we look forward to your continued support not only for my country but my party so that we can get back in the Government. There is no doubt that I will win, that our party will win the Presidency.

Thank you.