Saint Lucia is just-emerging from the presentation of Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre’s third national budget since taking office on July 26, 2021, just as Guyana is bracing for the ruling party’s most-important congress following the presentation of its fourth annual budget since 2020 – the latter funded by oil and gas and fuelled by energy and both by the determination governments committed to ensuring people come first when sharing national wealth.
Saint Lucia’s Labour Party (SLP) and Guyana’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP) have many common denominators since their formation around the middle of the 20th Century, when West Indian Labour Parties came after the end of World War II, thanks mainly to trade unions that sounded the tolling bells across the British West Indian territories through active revolutions against deprivation and exploitation, including in then British Guiana (BG) and Saint Lucia, in 1938.
The SLP and PPP have both spent more-than half-a-century promoting ‘Putting People First’ whenever in office, both paying equally-heavy prices for their historical pledges of loyalty to poor and working people – including both winning national elections in 1964 that were later robbed through post-electoral marriages-of-convenience.
Many Saint Lucians (including current Senate President Alvina Reynolds) can readily trace relatives who sojourned to ‘BG’ to dig for gold in the first half of the 20th Century; and likewise, many sons and daughters of Guyanese immigrants to Saint Lucia since the 1960s have built families and established family-businesses that also contribute to national development.
Such close ties were reaffirmed when Guyana’s President Dr Irfaan Ali was Saint Lucia’s special guest at its 45th Independence anniversary celebrations in February.
The PPP holds it 32nd Congress this weekend (May 3-5), which is arguably the most significant since the deaths of Co-Leaders and Founders Cheddi and Janet Jagan.
It’s also likely the most-important since 2020, when Guyana started developing and benefiting from its new oil wealth under the PPP/Civic administration led by President Irfaan Ali, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo and Prime Minister Mark Anthony Phillips.
Over 3,000 delegates and observers will engage in the usual reviews, updates and previews on party organizational, political, administrative, tactical and strategic matters.
But this PPP congress will also be quite unusual, coming at a time when Guyana is riding-high on the global stage, having opening the year in the Presidency of the United Nations (UN) Security Council and as Chair of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – and most-of-all, in light of the global exposure of Venezuela’s revived claim to its Essequibo region.
Under leadership of its ex-President Jagdeo and Executive President Ali and with a government willing to effect meaningful change, the PPP also has to ensure the current administration defeats the ‘Dutch Curse’ being wished on Guyana at home and abroad.
Likewise in Saint Lucia, where the political opposition specializes in creating Fake News out of nothingness to temporarily blind supporters, until exposed.
As always, the facts and figures defy the opposition claims in Georgetown and Castries, but the words and deeds of denial are being mutually extended to extraterritorial misrepresentation and indefensible partisan propulsion of acrimonious approaches to almost every issue involving state decisions affecting all parties’ supporters.
Like never before, the PPP/Civic alliance and the SLP’s post-election alliance today have both demonstrated how positive party policies upheld and advocated over decades can eventually influence decisions that enhance state policies to yield the fruits the PPP and SLP always demand whenever in opposition.
Lie SLP delegates last year, the PPP’s will decide on everything national — from energy policies to ongoing and new national development projects, including plans and long-term goals for Guyanese of all-five ethnic brackets, while continuing to demonstrate measurable levels of seriousness about breaking the racial political divide.
Results of the last mid-term local government elections in Guyana (and developments since then) have shown an unprecedented consolidation of PPP support among Afro-Guyanese and wider popular support from its policies of taking new benefits to places and people across Guyana — including hundreds of Amerindian communities.
In Saint Lucia, the SLP-led administration’s delivery on 2021 election promises at every monthly sitting of parliament while keeping food and fuel prices affordable continues endearing it with many who previously opposed Labour on purely partisan bases.
But both administrations also face unbridled opponents with no apparent qualms about public opinion, at home or in the global public square.
With national concern in Guyana about threats to sovereignty, partisan differences within and between parties should (ordinarily) be put on back burners to allow for united national responses, including establishing patriotic coalitions, whether for Democracy or Defence.
But not-so today, even where the SLP and PPP have demonstrated their ability and willingness to bridge traditional political and other gaps, more by leaps than bounds.
As both parties have shown when in office, it’s also usually-necessary for Coalitions of the Willing to establish sustainable mechanisms to ensure current gains continue between and beyond Regime Change.
But the PPP and SLP cannot be expected to bury their necks in sand and simply always be rigid and unbending, unrealistic and inelastic, in pursuit of genuine ways and means to continue to serve, for as-long-as they can also continue to show and reap the electoral goodies from Good Governance.
The SLP’s and PPP’s challenges today are still multifarious, multidimensional and mountainous.
The usual criticisms will precede and follow last week’s Saint Lucia Budget and this weekend’s Guyana Congress.
But that being so, it would also be very-wise for the loudest critics, in both cases, to always consider the enormity of the tasks facing today’s leaders of Party and State, against the background of a constantly changing regional and global environment.
Criticism is a normal and healthy process in politics, but should always be addressed on the basis of realism, not wishes.
In that sense, the most-unrelenting critics today should try to walk just-a-mile in the SLP’s or the PPP’s shoes…