By Karel Donk, published October 12 at 22:48
Across Suriname, the ruling government is moving forward on two parallel legislative tracks: one that shields state power and public assets from challenge, and another that clears the way for widespread seizure and expropriation of private citizens’ personal wealth. This system of stacked power is further reinforced by a judiciary that receives enormous, publicly funded payouts carved directly from the revenues generated by the state’s asset-grabbing practices.
One would expect this blatant, unapologetic expansion of state control to trigger widespread public outcry and urgent alarm. Instead, the essay argues, the Surinamese public has been lulled into such deep complacency that it fails to recognize the crisis approaching its door. This complacency does not surprise the author, who has observed this pattern for years. He points to a bitter irony: every year on July 1, the nation celebrates the formal abolition of chattel slavery, while most people fail to see that the current political system is simply a new form of enslavement – one that anti-colonial Surinamese thinker Anton de Kom already identified as harsher than the system it replaced.
Drawing on a parallel from 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved American activist, the author notes that people who believe they are free while accepting daily exploitation as normal and even beneficial are the “ideal slaves” in the eyes of ruling power holders.
Among the political class, a small number of self-styled concerned parliamentarians have raised mild objections, but the author argues their protest is little more than performance. Like obedient house slaves who collect crumbs from their master’s table, these lawmakers will ultimately vote in line with the ruling establishment’s demands, he predicts. Even so, the author suggests a small sliver of doubt may linger in their consciences: they may dimly recognize the harm they are unleashing on the public, including their own children and grandchildren, and the karmic consequences of their complicity.
This is not a new warning from the author. Back in April 2012, he published an open letter to the then-head of government, copied to senior politicians Jennifer Simons and Adelien Wijnerman, laying out how income taxes function within what he frames as an exploitative, anti-social system of modern enslavement. Now, more than a decade later, the same politicians who claim to support systemic change are not only preserving the status quo – they are actively pushing policies that make the system even more oppressive for ordinary people.
The author says he understands their position: politicians have little room to defy the ruling order, and face consequences for breaking ranks. This reality, he notes, explains why Simons has repeatedly stated she simply wants to “continue living” without rocking the boat.
A critical open question remains for investigative journalists to answer, the author says: where exactly are the impulses for these new asset-seizure laws coming from? The consequences of the upcoming legislation, however, are already predictable – and were laid out in full in that 2012 open letter.
One sharp irony cuts through the current political discourse: while leaders claim to be tackling corruption, the author argues these new laws will actually fuel more corruption and enable far more abusive forms of graft. Facing what he frames as state-sponsored aggression against their property, ordinary people will logically seek out every possible workaround to protect their assets from government overreach, he says.
This pattern will steadily erode social trust and accelerate societal decline, the essay warns, eventually ending in full systemic collapse. This is a repeating cycle for political systems built on the fundamental violation of individuals’ universal right to life and property. Such systems carry an inherent contradiction: they claim to organize and protect society through law, while simultaneously violating the basic rights of the people who make up that society. This internal contradiction makes the system unsustainable over time.
History is full of examples of this collapse, and the pattern is already playing out in other countries including the Netherlands and Belgium, where growing numbers of people are relocating to escape what the author frames as state overreach and asset seizure. In these nations, the rule of law no longer works for ordinary people, not least because judges themselves profit from the legalized extortion and exploitation built into the system.
The question facing Suriname is not whether the bill for this systemic exploitation will come due, but who will be forced to pay it, and how much will be left to salvage when that day comes. Those who cooperate to deepen the subjugation and impoverishment of the public today are laying the groundwork for their own downfall tomorrow.