The aftermath of Lusignan has exposed beyond all doubt that the administration really has no answers to the entrenched problems of this society, which is not to say that it is now prepared to entertain ideas from any other quarter. And to underline that fact, there was Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon, telling the media last week that any party “distorting” the government’s actions would not be consulted on issues relating to the killings of January 26. “In the context of engagement with stakeholders dealing with the [Lusignan] massacre, the State’s responses to dealing with stakeholders and their genuine concerns,” he was quoted by the Mirror as saying, “the administration will not be engaging the political Opposition and those who have already been judged and condemned for their unbalance and their proclivities for supporting and promoting the things that divide us where the issue is concerned.”
So much for wisdom; so much for vision; and so much for democracy.
In circumstances where the government needs more than anything else to “engage” others in the society on their perspectives and possible approaches to the security problem and the release of tensions, it retreats into the laager and finds meretricious excuses for not talking to anyone except itself. It is certainly a reflection of its arrogance that it believes it has a monopoly on possible solutions, but perhaps it is also symptomatic of an unacknowledged fear that others might in fact have useful suggestions to offer. If the ruling party accepted that these could be helpful, then it would have to confront the possibility that perhaps it lacked some of the necessary resources and the skills to address some issues in a meaningful way. Its rigidity, in other words, is an expression – at least in part – of its insecurity.
The PPP is also a prisoner of its own history, and in terms of theory, of its narrow communist past. Excluded from government for so many years, now it is in office it has adopted something of a belief in ‘divine right.’ Since only it can be the true government with all the answers, each and every critic must be denigrated; that is how its virtue is established. Anyone who comes with proposals which have not originated in Freedom House or the Presidential Secretariat is simply – to quote in full Dr Luncheon’s latest diatribe – “distorting government’s legitimate actions and promoting ethnic division.” And so now the administration closes its ears to civil society and political opposition, and ignores the recommendations in the various Disciplined Services reports. It will be recalled that at an earlier stage it had allowed the National Development Strategy, which was compiled with the help of a wide cross-section of Guyanese, to be sidelined.
Where the party’s views are concerned, its espousal of a version of Marxism-Leninism, has no doubt encouraged it in the notion that it is privy to the formula which allows it to govern in the right way. While it will hammer out a consensus from among varying opinions around the party table, therefore, it will not apply that principle outside of that context. It amends its direction only when forced to do so, and as so many writers have said, has reduced democracy to the holding of free and fair elections. This has nourished the view among many observers that the government compromises only when pressured to do so by foreign agencies, and among members of the PNCR that it does so only if that party takes to the streets.
This is not to say that the opposition has utilized its options either wisely or consistently, while in more recent times it has barely made its presence felt at all in any effective way. But the many shortcomings of the opposition do not explain away the blinkered vision of the administration. In other societies there are think tanks and the like, which indirectly, and sometimes directly, feed ideas to sitting governments – and oppositions, for that matter. Some of them, as Ralph Nader has said, are little better than lobbyists, but that is certainly not true of all of them. The whole concept is that in a democracy ideas which are useful can be generated from various sectors of the society apart from government, and that think tanks are in a unique position to look at the long term, rather than the immediate term with which administrations in small countries – especially ours – frequently concern themselves exclusively.
President Lula of Brazil, for example, has appointed Dr Roberto Mangabeira Unger as Extraordinary Minister for Strategic Affairs, a somewhat cumbersome title for a job which involves formulating “a project for the future.” A political philosopher from Harvard, he told the Financial Times in December last year that he decided, “to focus my work on particular initiatives that would converge in the direction of an alternative model of development and then organize our discourse around those initiatives.”
What his detailed initiatives in four specific areas are need not concern us here; however, it should be remarked that Dr Unger was a strong critic of the Brazilian President during his first term of office, and yet the head of state was still prepared to retain him. In our situation, of course, it would not matter how many Dr Ungers there were offering sophisticated formulations for the future development of the nation, the ruling party here would still remain deaf to their recommendations.
And so here we are in our latest critical situation with the government in its fortress firing poisoned darts at its supposed critics, and the situation in the countryside outside the walls deteriorating. The overwhelming majority of those ‘critics’ want a safe society – safe for everybody. They also want a model for development which benefits everybody. In terms of ultimate objectives is that not what the government wants too? The administration’s statements and its retreat into time-worn and counter-productive hostile political stances merely conveys to the world that it does not have a clue what to do next. And despite that it still turns its face against talking to anyone or listening to anyone beyond the Freedom House palisade.
The first problem to be overcome before the society can begin inching its way to possible accommodations and practical approaches to our more profound difficulties, and then on to larger visions, is the government’s deafness. No one has come up with the solution to that problem as yet.
