Guyana’s President David Granger: Allow the Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry the Two More Weeks Requested for Key Witnesses

Walter Rodney's 1980 assassination remains a most traumatising political murder in Guyana's history. A proper investigation into the death of this pre-eminent scholar and author of ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ was evaded until 2014 by both PNC and PPP governments, when the formal Commission of Inquiry started work.

All three commissioners, the lawyers representing the WPA, Donald Rodney and the Rodney family support this plea, but Guyana’s new government has refused to allow the Commission a final two weeks to finalise the investigation for transparently political reasons. Guyanese need and deserve a completed inquiry into this atrocity - let the Commission finish its long-awaited task.

Two weeks- little to help WRCOI unearth the truth and promote Guyanese healing and reconciliation

Granger’s APNU/AFC coalition came to power with a narrow win over the discredited PPP government, promising national reconciliation. Yet within days of their May 2015 win, they were undermining the WRCOI, in a short-sighted campaign to disparage and denigrate the Commission’s work, thus creating the impression that it accomplished nothing of substance.

A new dispensation for the Commission could resolve previous abuses. However new ministers, Attorney General Basil Williams -who represented the PNC at the WRCOI - and Governance Minister Rafael Trotman simply asserted that the two-week extension was disallowed to save taxpayers’ money and, more ominously, “further embarrassment”.

Is PNC leader Granger continuing to punish Rodneyism for exposing Burnhamism?

Rodney’s renowned legacy in Guyana endured sufficiently to curb racial voting for the first time in 50 years, thus enabling Granger’s win. Rodney’s political teaching had exposed the exploitative nature of Guyana’s historic ethnic Indian/ African conflicts.

But Rodney was seen as a racial traitor to some of the African middle class and a direct threat to Forbes Burnham’s power base. Forbes Burnham’s African dominated PNC’s 27 year dictatorship developed such a rotten culture of governance in Guyana, it laid a fertile foundation that facilitated the Indian dominated PPP to plumb new depths of corruption, brutality and extra-judicial killings, with little regard for due process, during their 23 year rule.

Urge the government of Guyana to reverse this vengeful decision to wreck the Inquiry

We exhort people of conscience everywhere, and especially those in the African and Guyanese diasporas, to stand in solidarity with all Guyanese working people, as did Walter Rodney in all of his life’s work, scholarship and activity to demand just two more weeks for the COI.

Sign the petition here.

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