The International Decade for People of African Descent Assembly Guyana (IDPADA-G) has called for the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to stand with them in their fight for justice, equality, and repair.
IDPADA-G through its Chairman Vincent Alexander accused the governing People’s Progressive Party of systematically marginalising African Guyanese.
“The African Guyanese community descendants of the enslaved, has been systematically marginalized and remains disproportionately at the bottom of the economic and social order. Education, land rights, entrepreneurship, and political representation all reflect this exclusion. Our school curricula continues to omit the history and contributions of the Guyanese of African descent”.
Mr. Alexander spoke of government’s seizure of ancestral lands without compensation, “ancestral lands acquired through the historic British movement are being seized without compensation, through institutional and legal manipulations and in spite of legal provisions. A functioning Human Rights Commission has yet to be constituted 20 years on. The government of Guyana while vocally supporting reparations abroad, as was done here today, has not implemented a single dedicated national policy to repair the internal legacies of enslavement”.
African Guyanese he told the UN forum are blamed for their circumstances and demeaned by public officials as being lazy or unworthy.
“The current governance structure entrenches this exclusion even within the Ethnic Relations Commission, which is in attendance here, to be represented by someone other than someone of African descent. Notwithstanding the African community asking for asking otherwise, the time for polite silence is over”.
According to Mr. Alexander, Labour Minister Joseph Hamilton did not represent the issues of the African Guyanese correctly.
“Notwithstanding the hypocritical presentation to this forum by Guyana’s Minister of Labor, who has publicly blamed the people of African descent for the present state and whose government has not taken any equitable action to address the state of the people of African descent”.