Dear Editor,
I am responding to the issue of an elected dictatorship, in which it seems Mr Dev and a person whose name I do not know were in some exchanges. I have seen Mr Dev’s column ‘Elected dictatorship’ in Kaieteur News (July 13) e-mailed to me by a friend.
At once I want to say that I used the phrase “elected dictatorship,” but not over “government’s delay in approving 39 EU funded projects,” as Mr Dev puts it. I understood that there was a veto of the 39 and used the term “elected dictatorship” in relation to that. People do not have to say “no comment at this time” if all they are doing is ‘delaying’ approval. It was in Parliament, when pressed by MP Williams, that the Minister for micro-projects made the answer that may be seen as saying that there was a delay. Other MPs should have pinned the Minister down. Everything, even this argument, has a history.
I spent years in the ’70s in the WPA trying to explain to human rights organizations and also to the PPP leadership that we were experiencing a dictatorship. The PPP leadership would only go as far as ‘semi-dictatorship.’ At the highest level they argued that there was no blood in the streets, no this, no that – therefore it was a semi-dictatorship. They then conceded a “creeping” dictatorship. I had to produce a document listing rights that had been lost since 1964. A copy exists somewhere.
At the time of that argument the PPP had not yet accepted the idea of a parliamentary dictatorship. When a Canadian statesman suggested the phrase to him in relation to Guyana the General Secretary, Dr Cheddi Jagan, began to toy with the description. There have, then, been disagreements about these matters. For some people, an anti-imperialist stand and relations with certain countries, with their ‘friends,’ blinded them to the importance of what people suffered. For others, a government governed mainly at home.
I really do not care what others call the PPP, really, if we can agree on its behaviour. Experience in Guyana is a textbook for me and I do not go first to other textbooks to be informed or tutored about that particular subject, not in the past and not now. Of course I read the scholars who are excellent at what they do. I understand Mr Dev’s position, I hope. From his location it is a reasonable one.
In fact I convinced others that the PNC was in government a dictatorship on the very ground that it could not be removed by an election. To test this, I argued with civic organisations that there should be an independent study of our electoral laws to see whether a fair election was possible under them. After some years the GHRA agreed to request such an investigation. The alert Mr Burnham did not allow the members of the probe team to come to Guyana, and a number of us, political and civic, travelled to Trinidad and Tobago to be interviewed by them. The first executive President passed away, and I completed the work of demonstrating through the courts, against the pleadings of the government law geniuses, that our electoral administration offended the constitution. Mr BE Gibson was one of the few to see my point. I stumbled on this by reading the fine print of gazetted materials. The PPP in its 28 years in opposition had not done so, simply because they and their lawyers used the UK as an electoral model and missed the differences.
Now the issue is posed in a different setting. There is a government resulting from freely counted votes, even allowing for the unnecessary cheating. There is also that extra seat which the PPP enjoys, apparently with the consent of its fellows in parliament.
My proposal on this issue did not cut ice.
Mr Dev allows, “The PPP has been guilty of acting in an authoritarian or dictatorial manner on occasion” and advises caution: “but this is a far cry from asserting that there is a dictatorship in place here and now while there are no restraints on voting the rascals out of office.” He also correctly points to the fact of a written constitution which the courts are authorized to uphold, although most plaintiffs would normally (and unfairly) have to be able to afford competent counsel.
Here we enter on tricky land. Mr Dev is slipping into an arithmetical definition of dictatorship. To follow him I must ask where do we find the number of “occasions” allowed a government for authoritarian or dictatorial acts before it becomes a dictatorship. Clearly there is no authority on this, not in our constitution.
If we are to speak of the written constitution as amended, then we have to say that it is not a moody document. Parliament can be adjourned and prorogued, dissolved, but the constitution cannot be put on recess at will.
Then there is the much forgotten oath of office. Those who take this oath are not undertaking to uphold the constitution when it suits their mood or their agendas. The oath does not go on holiday during the tenure of office.
Now, to go to another arithmetical mystery; we do not know how many “authoritarian or dictatorial” acts are hidden and do not come to light. Mr O’Lall’s interview with Mr Frederick Kissoon was most revealing. When we thought that Mr Gibson’s long activity at the bar had sufficiently warned governments against that kind of behaviour, there goes the axe against one of the fold. And all we get from his cowardly fellow members after his passing is, “He was a good comrade.”
Then there was torture, ordered from above, because it is so much protected from above. The prearrangements of this torture of the two young men from Buxton, as a start, it seems, were sinister and irresponsible in a multi-ethnic society. It seemed all of a piece with the torture of the treason accused under the previous regime.
But Mr Dev has made me go where I had not intended to go at this moment. Now I shall have to develop this evaluation.
It seems to me more rational to form, not rashly, but to form an opinion of the quality of governance rather than be guided by the number or frequency of its known violations. Here I go off on one of my senior, but useful, tangents. The political occupation seems to enjoy wide licence for its offences and more apology than others. Here is a public official or a company finance officer. This person steals a hundred thousand or double that amount, but does so “only” once a year, when the school fees of the offspring become due.
Can we say that this officer is otherwise quite an honest officer? Or take a husband who abuses a younger relative living with the family, but only does so on occasion, say when he drinks. The taxi-driver is a known daredevil, but carries overload and speeds “only” on his first two and last two trips.
We hear of “zero tolerance” of all these offences but not the political.
Mr Dev seems to be inviting me to give an opinion whether the post-elections violence starting in 2001 by what I prefer to call certain supporters of the cause of an opposition party has helped the PPP to secure its base. This is like asking whether heavy rainfall leaves the earth wet.
I can speak at first hand, since the behaviour of PPP supporters documented by me was one of the factors causing me to make every possible allowance for the Kabaka until he had had, like his rival, his seven years. I found later that Brother Moses Bhagwan independently applied a similar seven-year formula.
I have not seen the exchanges between him and the other person he described in his July 13 column. I note his fear that calling the PPP an “elected dictatorship” might serve to justify the 2001 long-lasting post-electoral violence. It is a pity that any recent analysis if true, should be avoided for that reason. To me, nothing can justify that development, then, or now.
Since I do not have a column, I must merely note the discussion on the tyranny of the majority and on lack of “restraint” on voters from removing, say, the present ruling party. There is much to be said on both.
The ‘tyranny of the majority’ in almost all cases of its use can blame innocent people within the majority. In the Rodney days, when the fear of gunfire was much confined, we placed special responsibilities on community majorities to protect minorities. Using the phrase on a national scale, as Mr Dev and the scholarly tradition do, is tempting, but unfair to many assumed to be part of that majority. We are on much more solid ground applying it to the known persons making up the Parliament, that is the National Assembly and the President. Here we find, not democracy, but a tyranny over the majority of the National Assembly, or the assembly as a whole.
The President has a reputation for failing to give assent to, or “signing” bills passed by the National Asssembly. In 2006 there were about ten of them.
They included the Labour Amendment Bill 2006, Holiday with Pay Amendment Bill 2006, Employment of Young Persons and Children Amendment Bill 2006, Consumer Protection Bill 2006, etc. I cannot say whether that formed part of the all-party petition to Caricom.
If the President does not sign such bills within the time fixed he is bound to give reasons to the National Assembly. Some court may tell us some day that these are not “mandatory.”
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
