Working Notes Towards the Unification of Guyana (Part I)
THE PROBLEM
- The political forces which for the past several years have been operating to drag the country back into the mud from which it was emerging in 1953/54, appear at last to have achieved a clear dominance in 1962. Thus, the time is at hand when a bold new political strategy is needed to pull the country up once more. This makes 1963 a decisive year.
- The immediate task is political integration, the ultimate aim: decolonisation, national development and the creation of a basis for full social integration.
- Up to the present, the various political groupings have not thought it necessary to bother about the political integration of the society as a whole. Some kind of national consensus was assumed, so that the question was being implicitly posed in the following way: how much political division could be risked while some particular set of goals were being pursued?
- Now that the Independence Conference has established that there is no real national consensus, and revealed the possibility of complete disintegration the time has come to rephrase the question as follows: what positive political steps and what programme of decolonisation and development are required to bring about and maintain the integrity of the society as a viable political whole?
- To help answer the question an attempt will be made in what follows:
(i) (a) to analyse the changes in the character of the political situation up to and since 1953 and (b) to identify the forces threatening complete breakdown of the political system in 1963 (II) and (III).
(ii)a) to outline a new strategy designed to achieve political re-integration (IV) and (b) to suggest some of the concrete steps of a programme of action at the constitutional level (V).
(iii) to articulate (a) the main elements of a long-term economic programme (VI) and (b) the details of a general programme of action for 1963 which would follow from the adoption of the new strategy (VII).
