By Analyst
Is the People’s National Congress dying? The party passed its 50th birthday quietly 15 months ago in October 2007 amid anxieties over its future. It survives and, although there is no danger of imminent implosion, it is certainly experiencing a mild mid-life crisis. Judging from the spate of newspaper articles especially since the August 2006 general elections, however, several persons including a growing group of its own former members seem ready to write its obituary.
Human institutions, like human beings, can perish quickly once they become dysfunctional. The United Force, for example − once a formidable force that played the part of ‘broker’ in the mid-1960s but was itself broken a decade later − is a reminder of what can happen to parties when they cease to serve any real interests other than those of their own apparatchiks.
Schismatics
Like all local political parties, the PNC is a coalition of factions. Schismatics, from time to time split from the main body to establish rival, usually ephemeral, parties of their own. The PNC from the start has been very vulnerable to such fission. Its first general secretary Jai Narine Singh broke away to form the Guyana Independence Movement and, another, Eusi Kwayana formed the Working People’s Alliance. Other senior members followed suit − Llewellyn John, formed the People’s Democratic Movement; Hamilton Green formed the Good and Green Guyana and Raphael Trotman founded the Alliance for Change.
The PNC is accustomed to this process that been going on for decades but has shown remarkable resilience.
Forbes Burnham’s death in August 1985 for instance, did not lead to collapse. Instead, it gave his successor Desmond Hoyte a golden opportunity to transform both the party and the government. Change did come and Hoyte’s painful Economic Recovery Programme was regarded as having saved the administration from self-destructing. The party’s vital organs, however, suffered irreparable damage during his ‘deburnhamisation’ campaign. Hoyte discarded the party’s co-operativist ideology, dismantled the once supercharged election machine and dismissed many staff members. Still in government, he sidelined party stalwarts and recruited a cadre of admirers to office most of whom vanished as soon as the party lost the October 1992 general elections. When ships are about to sink, rats are the first to run.
Populist parties tend to be fragile. A leader must expend effort continuously on reconciling rivals, restraining extremists, retaining skills and recruiting members. The expulsion of popular persons should be a last resort as the victims not only take their friends with them but, invariably, induce feelings of fear and uncertainty in those remaining. This happened when Hoyte tried to crush Hamilton Green’s insurgency by dropping him from the list of nominees for the National Assembly in 1992. The result was the formation of the GGG which defeated the PNC in Georgetown municipal elections soon afterwards.
It was risky for Robert Corbin to attempt a similar manoeuvre against Vincent Alexander and his team last year. The illusion of winning such one-sided contests invariably obscures a greater loss, in this case, the support of many seniors. In so doing, Corbin displayed a lack of the leader’s flair for uniting a fractious party. Worse was his ill-advised support for the odious Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2007 − referred to as ‘recall legislation’ − which enables representatives of parliamentary parties to request the Speaker of the National Assembly to declare a seat vacant when confidence is deemed to have been lost in a member who occupies that seat.
Tactics
Desmond Hoyte’s managerial antics from 1985 had the irreversible effect of alienating party members, triggering a twenty-year-long crisis of confidence and hastening the slide in electoral support. Many of the party’s urban and rural Guyana Youth and Students Movement and National Congress of Women groups disappeared on his watch. The party’s networks in the Barima-Waini, Cuyuni-Mazaruni, Potaro-Siparuni Regions also fell into decay, an expected consequence of losing office and losing access to state transportation and funding. In the good times, the youth and women’s movements were vibrant enough to produce new cadets for higher office in the party, the National Assembly and government but now the torrent of talent has been reduced to a trickle.
Despite leading the party in four elections − 1985, 1992, 1997 and 2001 − Hoyte never seemed to learn the art of campaigning. He neglected the need to communicate with constituents and to conduct house-to-house visits and resorted instead to long-range direction through public relations packages made up of big billboards, jingles and television advertisements. Unlike the PPPC’s Mirror newspaper, the PNCR New Nation disappeared. The party’s rural and hinterland supporters were literally left in the dark , beyond the reach of the PR boys.
Politics
Having given birth to the recovery programme in the late 1980s, the party’s job was done and it could well have melted away after it lost office in October 1992. But it lingered on while the People’s Progressive Party started its slow slide into mismanagement. When Dr Cheddi Jagan died in March 1997, therefore, Desmond Hoyte was on hand to foster the notion that he was the only person that was strong enough to replace him. Then came Mrs Janet Jagan’s controversial installation after the December 1997 general elections; the disruptive protests of 1997-98; the CARICOM-brokered Herdmanston Accord; the establishment of the constitutional reform commission and the start of a sclerotic bipartisan dialogue process. Most significantly, the High Court ruling that eventually vitiated the problematic 1997 election was seen to have vindicated the PNC’s contention that the elections were indeed flawed.
Events since 1997 kept the PNC in business, not only reassuring party members of their relevance to the political vitality of the country but also giving Hoyte the false hope that the PNC could reform itself and still win free and fair elections. Thus was born the People’s National Congress-Reform in December 2000. Given the poor state of the party, this was a masterstroke which extended its life and generated momentum for the March 2001 general elections. Senior members of the party, however, realised that Hoyte − already 72 years old − was past his prime. Running against Bharrat Jagdeo who, at 37 years, was a little over half his age, Hoyte was likely to be defeated. Insiders attempted a late, limp but leaderless putsch. The wily Hoyte outwitted them, held on to office and, as everyone except himself expected, crashed to his third defeat. His death in December 2002 was only half mourned as insiders felt that his attitude was obtuse, his methods were obsolete and his leadership was an obstacle to change.
Robert Corbin’s accession to the leadership had been planned by Desmond Hoyte from the time the party lost office in 1992. When Hoyte fell ill in April 1993, he engineered Corbin’s installation in the non-existent post of acting deputy leader. When Corbin eventually acceeded to the party leadership a decade later, he possessed more practical political experience than his predecessors − Forbes Burnham and Desmond Hoyte. But the party that Corbin inherited from Hoyte in 2002 was far different from the one that Burnham bequeathed to Hoyte in 1985. Corbin’s task of articulating a clear vision and inspiring cooperation was more challenging than theirs.
Mechanics
Robert Corbin, nevertheless, managed to be returned unopposed as Leader and to emerge from the 14th Biennial Congress in August 2004 with a strong mandate. Even then the party still seemed to be a credible force for national change and seemed able to present to the public an image of unity and purpose. But soon the wheels came off the wagon. Corbin underestimated the damage to party solidarity caused by Raphael Trotman’s insurgency and his resignation in May 2005.
On the approach of the August 2006 general elections, reformists made their last, desperate attempt to galvanise the PNCR’s campaign by forging an alliance with a new group called One Guyana. The plan also called for Corbin to step aside and allow someone regarded as more ‘electable’ to stand as presidential candidate. On this point, negotiations collapsed, Stanley Ming resigned and the last trace of the 2000 Reform element disappeared. The PNCR then entered an almost meaningless alliance with the remnant of One Guyana − the obscure National Front Alliance which had neither an identifiable constituency nor parliamentary experience.
With his four decades of experience in the party’s engine room, Corbin was thought to be the master of the mechanics of campaigning and was expected to engineer some great electoral exploit. Even if he had been able to retain Hoyte’s March 2001 general elections tally of over 164,000 votes, the history of this country would have been different.
He didn’t. Instead, he watched the party bleed, losing over 51, 000 votes and five seats in the National Assembly. Corbin has to take responsibility for a weak campaign, poor mobilisation and low turnout in traditional PNCR strongholds.
As everyone feared, the elections were as much a contest between the PPPC and the PNCR as a referendum on Corbin’s leadership. It was quite evident that a substantial number of PNC supporters chose to vote for the AFC. Even now, the party continues to lose talented officers.
The party’s repeated demonstrations of resilience cannot obscure the fact that confidence in Corbin’s leadership has evaporated. He can no longer provide the basis for political regeneration or parliamentary opposition. As long as the PNC’s raison d’être was to keep the PPP out of office, its acceptance was both inevitable and appropriate. There is still little doubt that the PNC is the most capable of winning the support of a large constituency and of leading an alliance that can contribute to democratic governance in this country. But, under Corbin’s leadership, the PNCR-1 G simply does not evince either the capacity or credibility to represent the interests of its constituents as the main opposition to the PPPC Administration.
The PNC is not yet dead but Robert Corbin’s style of leadership is.
