Dear Editor,
Shadow Natural Resources Minister Sharma Solomon hit a raw national nerve this week when he cautioned against celebrating Indigenous people in Georgetown while abandoning them at the backdam. His critique exposes a fundamental, hypocritical glitch in how Guyana manages its resources, its geography, and its first peoples.
Solomon’s observation that an Indigenous Toshao is forced to physically stand in front of heavy excavators at Chinese Landing or Tassawini to protect ancestral lands is not an isolated governance failure. It is the direct consequence of running a US$21 billion 21st-century economy on an outdated, 18th-century colonial software operating system.
For months, I have argued in these pages that Guyana’s modern “hardware” our coastal highways, oil infrastructure, and glittering Georgetown hotels is being built on a corrupted cultural software. At the core of this operating system is an entrenched, paternalistic authority structure that treats citizens not as equal partners, but as subjects to be managed. Nowhere is this Massamentality more obvious than in our institutional posture toward Amerindian communities.
On the international stage, Guyana rightly accepts accolades and carbon credit revenue for preserving its standing forests under the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS). Yet, as Solomon rightly notes, the state turns around and treats the underground mineral wealth beneath those very forests as “somebody else’s business.” We praise Indigenous communities as global guardians of nature when it suits our environmental marketing, but reduce them to physical obstacles when a mining permit or state-backed interest enters the hinterland.
This double standard is rooted in our historic, uncritical devotion to a “coastal civilization.” As I have detailed in my writings on the necessity of a “Southern Turn” and the need to move “Beyond the Plantation,” our coastal political class remains trapped in a colonial extractivist mindset. The coast treats the interior merely as a resource frontier to be plundered for timber, gold, and minerals, rather than a living human landscape defined by ancient sovereignty, rich cultures, and sophisticated ecological wisdom.
By marginalising Indigenous voices when gold is discovered, we commit a double tragedy. First, we violate the fundamental rights of our First Peoples, subjecting their creeks to toxic mercury, degrading their fishing grounds, and forcing leaders to put their lives on the line for legal titles that should be inviolable. Second, we shut the door on the very knowledge systems needed to transform Guyana’s broader political and cultural life.
To build a genuine “Orange Economy” or any truly creative, democratic public sphere we cannot rely on performative listening or top-down mandates from Georgetown. We must execute a profound, humble, and open engagement with our interior. We must learn from the relational architecture and deep spirituality of our Indigenous communities, whose ways of thinking offer a completely different, sustainable template for human organization and resource stewardship.
A government that truly listens would not force a Toshao to blockade an excavator to be heard. It would recognize that the dollar beneath the soil can never be worth more than the life and culture above it. It is time to update our national software: to respect Amerindian land sovereignty in practice, to audit overlapping mining boundaries honestly, and to embrace the interior not as an extractive backdam, but as the philosophical and moral core of Guyana’s sovereign future.
Sincerely,
Dr. Walter H. Persaud
Source: Kaieteur News
