The inaugural Hugh Desmond Hoyte memorial lecture was delivered in Georgetown by Rt. Hon Sir James Mitchell former Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines
I wish first of all to thank you for inviting me to return to Guyana. I wish to thank you for considering me suitable to present my thoughts in memory of a departed friend, Desmond Hoyte.
Let me begin by apologizing for not attending Desmond’s funeral. He died when I was immersed in the writing of my autobiography, a period when I was not listening to Caribbean news. I am ashamed that the current leadership of my country did not deem it appropriate that arrangements be made for me to attend the ceremonies in honour of a Head of Government with whom I served in this region. This was not the way I served when I led my country. When Tom Adams of Barbados died and I was Prime Minister, I arranged for my predecessor Milton Cato, the leader of a different party, to be in my delegation to pay respects to the colleague with whom he had served. I did so even though Mr. Cato had ignored my request to accompany him to the funeral of Robert Bradshaw in St Kitts, with whom I had served. Nevertheless, I paid my own way and attended Mr. Bradshaw’s funeral. I carried with me what was the only surviving flag of the Federation, and threw it into his grave. I had kept the flag which flew over the agricultural experimental station where I worked as an agronomist. So I dumped the flag of a bygone era and shed a tear for the only Federal Minister of Finance and our dreams of that age.
When I was Prime Minister and a former colleague died, we the Heads of Government would discuss who would attend, and ensure due respect was paid. So it was that when Lynden Pindling passed on, I was there. When Cheddi Jagan and Michael Manley died about the same time, Basdeo Panday and I came to Guyana and others went to Jamaica. When Pierre Trudeau died, when we were all in Montego Bay, and as Chairman of Caricom, I was not available to go; we selected the retired John Compton, a personal friend of Mr. Trudeau, to represent the region.
You may well ask, why I mention these things! For me the answer is simple – If we do not respect our fallen leaders, when are we going to love our history? If the leaders of our time, infused with the arrogance of their own perfection, pay no respect to the foundations of their (albeit imperfect) society, who then will respect their memory when they have not demonstrated to the youth any appreciation of our heritage? How long will our culture of democratic tradition remain in infancy?
Now let me deal with some elements of history that relate to the evolution of politics in Guyana, and my role in the process. Some of this is already in my autobiography “Beyond the Islands” published in London by Macmillan. In the book I referred to the Mustique meeting held in January, 1986, and our demands that elections in Guyana be monitored in future and that there be an end to the leftist policies which we thought were oppressive. The background to the Mustique meeting needs to be historically understood. We in the Caribbean community had heard of the irregularities in Guyanese elections. We knew that overseas voting through representatives in our islands was fraudulent. There simply was not the number of Guyanese then in our islands that the votes indicated. We read of the analysis in England and the United States, where certain addresses of voters did not exist. We learned of the skewed results in certain villages in Guyana. Very early in my political life, as we the trade ministers negotiating the basic free trade area for the region were meeting in Guyana every three months, in the period between 1968 and 1974, I had witnessed the impact of socialism on the closure of businesses. I was familiar with the “opium of the intellectuals” and the jargon “securing the commanding heights of the economy”. I was present to listen at first hand to some of the language in negotiation for the nationalization of bauxite and sugar. I became familiar with the social tensions between the Afro-Guyanese and the Indo-Guyanese.
It was enough for me. When during the colonial times in the late sixties our Chief Minister came back from Guyana with a proposal to our executive council, the precursor of our cabinet, that we become an associate state of Guyana rather than of Britain, I began a revolt that ended with my dismissal from the party and to my becoming the famous Independent who, after the general election, assumed the premiership.
The election subsequent to the death of President Burnham took place when I had come out of a long spell in lonely opposition to be Prime Minister in July, 1984, so I was sympathetic to the concerns of the PPP opposition in Guyana. It was Dame Eugenia Charles who first took up the Guyana issue in Caricom. With the furor around President Hoyte’s succession, she demanded publicly that we throw Guyana out of Caricom and forthwith move the Secretariat out of Guyana.
A Trinidadian friend high up in the Hindu establishment, Sat Maharaj, owner of The Bomb newspaper, then holidaying in Bequia, suggested I do something to retrieve the situation in Guyana. I did not like the idea of removing the Secretariat from Guyana, period, even though a central location among the islands would be more convenient for all concerned. Political action is not about convenience. Moreover, we had no capacity in the Caricom treaty to expel a member. Both John Compton and I, who had been at the 1968 Barbados Conference that expanded Carifta, were painfully aware how Guyana was allocated the Secretariat, to counter the historic error of exclusion from the Federation. Forbes Burnham had secured the Secretariat, and we would be eroding his legacy at our peril. The genesis of the meeting explains how The Bomb secured exclusive rights on the story.
I therefore called around to the member Governments and secured the attendance at a private meeting in Mustique of St. John of Barbados, Blaize of Grenada, Compton of St Lucia, Simmonds of St Kitts/Nevis, Dame Eugenia, Desmond Hoyte and myself. I made all the arrangements and so chaired the meeting. We sat in the shade of a balcony looking across the islands and the Caribbean Sea. We were all very cordial to one-another. Desmond outlined the events, the procedures, the areas of support and the outcome of the election. He was emphatic that he had secured substantial support among the Indian community, apart from the traditional Afro-Guyanese. We got Eugenia to understand that we could not, nor should we, attempt to move the Secretariat out of Guyana, and that the threat of expulsion was a non-starter.
But the first thing Desmond Hoyte agreed to was that future elections in Guyana would be observed by us and internationally monitored. This was our secret compact. We would not put out a release to embarrass Desmond, but would say that we had resolved outstanding issues (for the advance of democracy). Desmond also agreed to lift the ban on newsprint and give the opposition some space. Mustique has a calming atmosphere. As we were looking across the Caribbean Sea, I explained to Desmond that his shrimp boats were selling shrimp to our tourist hotels and purchasing flour to smuggle back into Guyana. I remember urging on him that if he had the Indian support he claimed he should lift the ban on importation of flour and let the Indians have their roti without the expensively smuggled flour.
When I became co-leader of our international team of election observers in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas lost power, I subsequently wrote to Desmond following up on our Mustique commitment, and stressed the importance of internationally accepted standards for national elections. He sent up an emissary to collect the literature I had kept from Nicaragua on election monitoring. When the PPP leader Dr. Jagan called on me during a subsequent meeting of the Caricom Heads of Government in Jamaica, stating how he was inclined to boycott the election, I did my best to convince him that he should not do so, explaining further the Commonwealth’s election observer structures that had been put in place. I had invited him to breakfast at the hotel in Kingston. Fresh in my mind, were the deliberations during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kuala Lumpur, where we had agreed on the methodology for setting up observer missions throughout the Commonwealth. Dr. Jagan told me he could not trust any Secretary General in the Commonwealth. I suggested he go to London to test the waters, meet with the UK Government and Commonwealth High Commissioners. I then informed Desmond of the substance of our meeting. My agenda was quite straightforward. While President Desmond Hoyte, in his own quiet style, was very gracious in listening to my report on the meeting with his opposite number, Cheddi Jagan, and even though I remained sensitive to the rough and tumble of political campaigns, I simply wanted to see things done fairly in Guyana, as promised in the Mustique meeting. When I congratulated Dr. Jagan on his subsequent success at the polls, he invited me to visit immediately. I was pleased to make contact from his office telephone for a visit from the World Bank, and secure the Bank’s early presence in Guyana. When there was confusion following further elections, I was happy to be an emissary at the St Lucia Heads of Government meeting, between President Janet Jagan and Desmond Hoyte.
You, the people of Guyana may recall, too, the work I put in for investment in rice production with St Vincent capital in Guyana. My last foray for Guyana was in the Canouan Heads of Government meeting, when I tried to resolve with President Bharrat Jagdeo and Suriname’s President Jules Wijdenbosch, the disputed maritime boundary which was producing a tense situation because of possible oil and gas resources. I also tried to initiate boundary dialogues between Presidents Hoyte and Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela. I trust these reminiscences highlight my enduring affection for Guyana. Other stories of your land and people I trust will be enjoyed in my autobiography “Beyond the Islands”, including the manner in which I structured an environmental programme to import your quartz sand for the construction industry in St Vincent & the Grenadines and other Caribbean territories, to save our beaches.
But I will not be doing justice to your invitation to deliver this Hoyte Memorial Lecture if I simply dwell on the past. I am concerned about your constitutional future as I am about the constitutional way forward for all of us.
I have been involved in all aspects of government in the region, colonialism, statehood, independence. I am the last Prime Minister alive who went through all stages of this process. With the continuing downward international pressure on our economies, there is no way the winner-take-all principle of governance will lead to enduring peace. Whatever the distortions of the past, and the need to redress the twisting of fortunes, it is more than time that we call a truce and deploy our passions in thinking about the way forward now, and for future generations. Let not experience be wasted. Let not our intellect continue to slumber in cynicism so that new answers will not be entertained. Any system that entrenches misery, however constitutional, will not endure. Revolt in the mind can unfortunately, with the modern tools of violence, be more destructive than constructive. I worry
about these things and I do not like to look down the road at the implications. We have to abandon the extremities and create a centre that can hold. We may not find the ideal answers but we must move toward them, for we cannot afford to do nothing, and in this drifting process allow the world to think we are a hopeless case.
As an outsider, I conceptualize that a country as vast as yours will enjoy greater residential choice if there is responsibility in the regions. The question is how far should that regional responsibility go and not fracture the country? Provincial responsibility works elsewhere. It can work in Guyana, but it cannot work with a power vacuum in the regions. Does a federal structure make sense? A taste of power-sharing with distribution of benefits away from a cloistered centre will certainly enhance the whole. All that is needed is the declaration of the vision, together with the courage and patience to execute it. Power-sharing is not about sharing the existing cake – adding ingredients attracted from new resources expands the cake.
My political experience spans the spectrum of all political dispensations of the Westminster system. I was in opposition twice, premier of a coalition and prime minister unbeaten for four terms. I once captured all seats in parliament. I was once alone in opposition. I led a government with a majority of seats and a minority of the popular vote. I have been harassed by commissions of enquiry at horrendous personal legal cost every time I left office, and which proved nothing. In biblical terms, I have personally witnessed how those who say “Hallelujah” in the morning – shout “Crucify him” in the evening. But what matters in the end is not what happens to us as a Prime Minister or a President, but whether or not we have used our power to enhance the quality of life for ‘our people and improved their freedom of choice.
At the centre of Government, your racial tensions cry out for redress. May I be allowed to be bold enough to say that a directly elected President and Vice-President would force both sides to contemplate harmony, with an ethnically mixed presidential and vice-presidential team? Your problems of the impact of race on politics are similar to those of Trinidad and Tobago. If both your countries had their executive President and Vice-President elected directly by the people, is it not obvious that political parties would be forced to select candidates for these offices from the different ethnic groups? Would not the realities of such a power structure produce economic results which must impact on fairness in society as a whole? As you go from election to election with an evolving history, as one generation succeeds another, the face of change will itself be one of alternating patterns of change. As you have already seen, a country of mixed ancestry may freeze ethnic opportunity at its peril. Can all political parties summon the courage to make such a leap of faith and translate the possibility into a new constitution? A country is lucky if it escapes tyranny by peaceful means. Let us therefore dwell on these things as we seek to understand how we got where we are and where we want to go.
To find a new structure for a parliament, all we need do is to look around the world at other systems, accept our own shortcomings and determine in which new directions we should go. Working out of my experiences and seeing how other systems work and don’t work, I have concluded that we need two things:
A mixture of proportional representation and constituency representation
A mixture like the American system of committees and ministerial appointments outside the parliament, answerable to those committees.
I have witnessed the mixture of proportional representation and first-past-the-post in action when I led a team to observe elections in Lesotho. Very simply, the voter has two sheets of paper of different colours, one for the PR and the other for the constituency. This means that the parties control the PR and individuals are free, should they so wish to choose a constituency representative outside their party choice, but there has to be a threshold of a certain percentage of PR votes before a party secures a seat. Beyond that threshold a third party may emerge. Proportional representation traditionally leads to a splintering of the political system unless it embodies the principle of a threshold of votes. It is therefore essential that in contemplating proportional representation, there be a minimum threshold of 5 percent for entitlement to a Parliamentary seat. A good example of the functioning of this threshold in proportional representation is Germany, a system that has produced stable conditions. A bad example of PR without a threshold is Israel, with its splintering of political opinion that in my personal opinion is a hindrance to their peace process.
Above all, we need fairness in the electoral process, and I want to say a word or two about free and fair elections. I have headed up three election observations, in Latin America, Europe and Africa. Moreover, I have been involved in guiding the process toward elections in Haiti, and also had a hand in guiding the Gambia in West Africa back from military rule to democracy. In both instances I advised delay of the election, as the election machinery was not ready. I want to say categorically that it is not enough, as Caricom or the OAS is now doing, to send in a perfunctory team to witness infractions only on polling day. It is important to determine whether or not the electoral commission’s or the supervisor of election’s integrity is unquestioned. It is important to know that there are no flaws in the registration of voters. There should be no last-minute registration which cannot be effectively scrutinised and any law that makes this possible cannot be deemed fair. In the case of my own country, St Vincent & the Grenadines, it is on record in the report of a previous supervisor of elections, that his administration could not effectively control registration in the short period between dissolution of parliament and Election Day. Cleaning up that law is our national priority. It is important to know that sectors of society outside the political parties have confidence in the electoral process. The observers should be in a position to declare before polling day that all systems are in place for a free and fair election. This means that the institution sending in observers should establish a presence in sufficient time to assess the credibility of the process, including the adherence to the spirit and letter of the laws. An election monitoring team must be in a position to declare that an electoral commission or supervisor of elections has done its job to internationally accepted standards. This means being on the ground with sufficient time to satisfy such criteria with the appropriate public comment. If there are not enough resources provided to satisfy the criteria, the institution should state the limitations around their competence. Our democracy is too important for casual interest. An institution planning to monitor an election does not enhance its image when it rushes to appoint observers without serious appraisal of their credentials and it loses credibility when it deploys observers without tools. It is for us alone, however, to create traditions of fairness. We are off the geopolitical map. The struggle is ours to put our house in order before confidence in our democracy collapses and before frustrations spill into violence.
Caricom regularly appoints a Prime Minister to be responsible for its governance, but I am not aware of any report on the state of governance in any of our territories. Let me place on record that on my mission to prepare the electoral ground in Haiti, we prepared a comprehensive report covering all the political parties and civil society. There should be a report on governance in our territories released annually. With each election there should be a conclusion by the citizens of a country that democracy has been advanced.
I recall now with pleasure how, in leading the observer mission in Nicaragua in 1990, I lectured the Sandinista high command on how to behave should they lose the election. Loss of a democratic election is not death, but a process toward the future. Today, eighteen years later, Daniel Ortega is the elected President of Nicaragua.
When I arrived in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, to observe their election as head of a Commonwealth team, we were heartened to recognise the work already done by a member of our advance team in checking the registration process, even in relatively inaccessible and remote villages.
When, in the seventies, I emerged as the sole opposition member in my country’s Parliament, Caricom was silent on the amendment to the constitution to deprive me of the leadership of the opposition. I was therefore sensitive to the plight of opposition. Such was the background that induced me to hold that Mustique meeting on Guyana’s questionable election process.
I hope I have not bored you with these reflections around the globe, but while I have outlined some of the problems in our region, please do not conclude that· I despair about our condition. One of our countries, Barbados, is already a shining light of democracy, as the results both of that country’s quality of life and their continuing attempt to resolve further development issues demonstrate.
I worry about the other extreme, where incipient tyranny erodes freedom of expression, even as the sinews of checks and balances become frayed. Within the confines of small states it will not always be easy from generation to generation to find the visionary strategy capable of reversing decline. We need to get to the point of self-sustaining momentum, even as a certain standard of decency in governance thrives. Let us therefore resolve to be our brothers’ keeper.
The state in which a nation finds itself is not only a product of leadership, but the framework (constitution) through which the nation moves, stagnates or retrogresses. The quality of everyday life, the wealth or poverty of its citizens, relates to the systems in society and leadership. In a nutshell, my view of political life is simply that the quality of life in a country depends on its leadership. You, the people of Guyana, a country larger than England, can ask yourselves the question why, with your comparative advantage of plenitude of resources, is your currency less valuable than the currencies of Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean? In terms of finding an answer, it is not enough to conclude with historic blame. History does not evolve through blaming parents or the previous generation of leaders. But I will go further. Let us ask the question, to what extent is the quality of the Guyana constitution responsible for the value of your currency? To what extent is the Guyana constitution responsible for Guyana’s debt? To what extent should a constitution be blamed for instability? Does the constitution generate and sustain meritocracy in the society or, put another way, does the constitution contribute to the brain drain?
The more we seek to determine historic causes for our inadequacy, the more will arise the question: how do we go from here, how do we establish the confidence to ensure the talent within our shores remains to help others toward a better quality of life? In my view, the way forward is not simply to seek answers through the election of a new crop of leaders, but to create the constitutional framework to provide maximum use of all the human resources, which in turn will impact on the development of your natural resources in a way that engenders a better quality of life. A frozen structure that confines opportunity within ethnic boundaries cannot yield the greatest possible prosperity for all.
In conclusion, I wish to say to other leaders on the stage, some of us will last longer than others. Some of us will attend more funerals than others. But it all goes back to Shakespeare in the end: “All the world’s a stage …we have our exits and our entrances …”
Nevertheless, we the leaders should do our best to keep the stage we inherited in good repair. Politicians will always be faced with a question over our legacy: did we leave the stage we occupied in good condition? I leave that question about Burnham, Hoyte and Jagan for you and succeeding generations of Guyanese to answer. And as you do so, perhaps you will bear down on the more relevant question; do you need to restructure the Guyana stage today? This is a question not only for you, but for the rest of us and our stages in the region.