“Surinamese society is on the verge of collapse”
The “Surinamese society is on the verge of collapse; […] the country is gripped by […] continuous price rises, […] and the inability of the Venetiaan-government to turn things around for the better. Then there is the controversial bribery affair which forced the treasurer of the Hindustani party VHP, the vice-chairman of the Creole NPS and the President of the Central Bank to resign.
The consequences for companies, government institutions and private individuals are dramatic: no one knows where they stand anymore. In a joint statement, the Association of Surinamese Industry (VSB) and the Association of Surinamese Manufacturers (ASFA) call the situation ‘ungovernable’. The government of President Venetiaan […] can no longer give direction to the economy in virtually any way.
Banks and the new money exchange offices […] are participating most vigorously with the foreign currency magnates that are driving up the exchange rates of foreign currency on the black market. They, too, are bidding higher and higher in order to obtain the much coveted foreign currency. […] Because banks and legal money exchange offices do not have enough foreign currency to meet demand, the black market is flourishing as never before.
A handful of wealthy ‘foreign currency magnates’ in the informal sector, closely linked to political opposition and trade circles, are now in fact determining the direction of the economy on the Surinamese currency market.
The consequences are ‘dramatic’, as Venetiaan himself characterized it. Last week Venetiaan and finance minister H. Hildenberg had to explain in parliament what the government intends to do to stop the foreign currency exchange rates from rising. ‘Measures’ will be taken, they assured the parliament, but a concrete answer was not forthcoming. In the political arena emotions are running high because of all the unrest. Venetiaan has been accused by the parliamentary opposition of ‘dictatorial’ tendencies.”
The above quotes come from two articles by Leo Morpurgo published in the NRC Handelsblad, namely “Surinamese society is on the verge of collapse” (September 16th 1993) and “Towering inflation strikes Suriname” (November 14th 1994).
Change the names Venetiaan, Hildenberg and VHP/NPS to Bouterse, Hoefdraad and NDP, and you would think that the articles talk about the current situation in Suriname since we’re now, 27 years later, experiencing the same again.
When we study history closely, it turns out that generation after generation, we keep on going around in the same vicious circle and keep facing the same problems within the current anti-social system of enslavement. The only thing that changes are the faces in the criminal government; the system itself stays in place and delivers the same results time and again, namely, the exploitation of the slave masses and profiting of the political and financial elite. As Mr. Watamaleo on Facebook summed it up: “Same script, different cast.”
At a three-day conference of the AVVS de Moederbond in January 2016, Mrs. Jennifer Simons stated that “we have all come to power once, but none of us has succeeded in ensuring sustainable development.” She also said that there are certain questions we need to answer, such as “what have we all done wrong, what should we do differently and how are we going to do it differently?”
As I indicated in a previous article on Starnieuws, the current political/economic system is specifically designed to replace the old form of slavery with a more efficient form in which the labor of the slaves would be controlled by the money. Mrs. Simons rightly made the remark: “This is not progress, the political-economic model is not sustainable. Working people have not benefited from it.”
It is no coincidence that the current political/economic system continues to do exactly what it was designed to do, namely, exploitation of everyone on the plantation Suriname regardless of which overseers temporarily “come to power”.
The lesson we should learn from this is that the only solution is to replace the current system, imposed and left behind by the colonizer, in its entirety with a different way of living together. Continuing to vote and participate in this system is not only immoral, but also futile. Placing other people in the same positions within the same anti-social system of enslavement is absolutely not going to change anything in the long term. On the contrary, we’re going to encounter the same predictable results over and over again with every new generation of politicians. History has proven this time and again, nationally and internationally.
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