Was the lame observance of the 17th anniversary of the People’s Progressive Party’s 1992 election victory a case of intellectual exhaustion?
In the post-election euphoria of Dr Cheddi Jagan’s presidency in the early 1990s, the 5th of October was accorded an iconic status as a sort of quasi national day. For the People’s Progressive Party, that day became more than the celebration of an electoral victory. It was transformed into a major state occasion for the presentation of national awards, broadcasts to the nation and the publication of laudatory booklets and articles of the party’s performance, all at state expense.
This year was different. The peripatetic president paid little attention to the occasion. The main political event was a low-key discussion by a panel comprising Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud, Presidential Adviser on Governance in the Office of the President Gail Teixeira, and Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon.
The October revolution
Luncheon gushed that the 1992 elections and the PPP victory ushered in a period of 17 years of growth and progress in four consecutive PPP administrations – those of Cheddi Jagan, 1992-97; Samuel Hinds, 1997; Janet Jagan, 1997-99; and Bharrat Jagdeo, 1999-2009 – after 28 years of administrative dictatorship. Guyana in 2009, Luncheon exclaimed, exceeded anything evident under the 28 years of People’s National Congress rule. There were “amazing achievements across the board and challenges handled in ways that promoted the well-being of Guyanese by a sensitive and responsible administration, conscious of natural disasters, economic sector and the working poor.” Not everyone would agree.
Luncheon emphasised that the most important thing was the “positive psychological impact on the masses of this country as captured by the vision of a successful government and the development of a thriving private sector with an ability to move forward.”
The PPP administration, he said, was prepared to confront whatever faced the nation, confident and assured, with “a sustained belief in the destiny of the country,” an emotion that was absent in 1992. “No greater gift,” he believed, could be bestowed on the people of Guyana – surety of development in an environment that practices democracy, poverty alleviation and enhanced material welfare of citizens and investing in people, the environment and infrastructure.
Persaud, in his contribution to the conversation, suggested that the defining attribute of the past 17 years lay in the skilful, structured and stable leadership of Guyana’s complex society that had projected “a measure of confidence and expectation and created a framework and policies for involvement and development.”
Teixeira claimed that the PPPC administration had reached across the political divide and made a tremendous effort, especially with a government composed of a PPP-C alliance signalling a model involving larger forces. Constitutional reform, community development, engaging society on all levels, working to bring “trust and confidence” at the community level, access to leadership by communities, national consultations, workshops, delegations, development in the allocation of house lots and land ownership by Amerindians were among other aspects of “a democracy at work.”
She added that the vision and the skilful management of the country – which has been manifested in the National Development, Poverty Reduction and National Competitiveness Strategies and, most recently, the Low Carbon Develop-ment Strategy – enhanced the standard of living and placed Guyana in the international forefront. She made no mention of another strategy – the National Drug Strategy Master Plan – that was launched and smothered during her troubled tenure as Minister of Home Affairs.
How could the three PPP executives not mention the news that Guyana’s most notorious narco-trafficker – Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan – was due to be sentenced for some of his crimes in a New York court? How could they not bewail the armed robberies and murderous maritime piracy, the fuel-smuggling, gun-running, contraband smuggling and backtracking that rage along the coastland? How could the Persaud-Teixeira-Luncheon performance display such an amazing absence of objectivity and departure from reality?
To put on such a demonstration of dissimulation after 17 years must be an indication of internal intellectual exhaustion by persons who were at their wits end to avoid addressing the country’s most pressing reality – the crime crisis. Little wonder that unprecedented external execration has arisen in large part out of the aberrations in the administration’s security policies especially over the past decade. In short, as the party talk show made clear, the PPP does not seem to understand why it is failing and so has no idea what to do to avoid the logical outcome of the loss of political confidence by the public.
The improvement in physical infrastructure – the rehabilitation of roads, construction of the sports stadium, Berbice River bridge, rehabilitation of school buildings and regional hospitals and other public works – has been one of the administration’s undeniably impressive achievements. Contrary to the discussants’ declarations, however, the PPP’s main failure has actually been the generation of a negative “psychological impact” and the loss of “trust and confidence,” even among its staunch supporters, despite those very public works. To claim otherwise would be a gross distortion of the truth.
The March revolution
The source of the PPP’s difficulties is much more profound and much more problematic than is commonly supposed. The party finds itself being rejected by society because it has repudiated the very institutions, structures and culture of society itself. Its socialism was never quite about creating autonomous collective structures to empower individuals, regardless of their circumstances and to enable them to prosper. Its socialism was merely a form of social authoritarianism in which the statist party perceived society as a collective uniformity guided perpetually by a vanguard party – itself.
Some electoral victories can be merely episodic. But the dilemma which gave rise to the recent non-celebration of the electoral anniversary has its origins not in the 5th October election victory led by Cheddi Jagan that can be regarded as episodic. It can be traced to the 19th March 2001 victory led by Bharrat Jagdeo in which the party won a comfortable majority of the popular vote. That election has turned out to be epochal.
Extreme theorists, on one hand, have located the party’s present policy dilemma in its historic adherence to the Soviet-style, Leninist, statist authoritarianism favoured by Cheddi Jagan. On the other hand, a closer examination indicates that its most recent problems have arisen out of the party’s pact with a new form of comprador capitalism. There has been a consequent and persistent failure to address the core issues and needs of civil society and of the labour movement and the masses in general. This is evident in the restlessness of the usually party-friendly Guyana Agricul-tural and General Workers’ Union and the degradation of the Guyana Trades Union Congress.
The post-2001 PPP has come to see society as the domain of certain individuals, but only certain individuals, who are free to pursue subjective interests of their own. This inexorably led to the criminalisation of the state and, in turn, precipitated a grave security crisis. Thus, the PPP’s biggest problem sprang largely from policies adopted to deal with the security crisis that arose specifically in the post-2001 period and which exposed the ideological and political contradictions within the party itself.
The post-2001 rampant individualism that is now prevalent has been built on the foundations of the post-1992 statism and is different in character. The PPP set out to reinforce state authoritarianism by the debilitation or deformation of important institutions such as the National Assembly and by undermining the independence or impartiality of the Public Service, the Security Services and the constitutional commissions set up to safeguard the integrity of those very institutions.
Important constitutional organs such as the Ombudsman and the Public Service Appellate Tribunal which provided assurances to the public and protection from executive lawlessness have virtually vanished. Regulatory and law-enforcement agencies – the Customs and Trade Administra-tion of the Guyana Revenue Authority; the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit; the Environmental Protection Agency and the Guyana Energy Agency – have been starved of assets, equipment, financing and personnel to such an extent as to impair their ability to function effectively. The Government Information Agency and the state media have excluded dissenting views and have increasingly become not organs in the public interest but agencies of the ruling political party – the PPP.
The cost of the narco-driven crime wave and the degradation of national institutions since March 2001 has been intolerably high. That is why the Persaud-Teixeira- Luncheon talk show chose to avoid mentioning anything whatsoever about them. To talk of public confidence without considering public safety is meaningless.
The PPP’s dominant legacy over the past 17 years has not been the creation of a balanced society of shared interests. A balanced society should be one in which individuality and communality merge into nationality or, at least merge into a group identity that reflects and represents both individual and communal identity. Guyanese society, being a group of diverse elements, should recognise the claims and needs of all its constituents. It should move beyond sectional interest and self-interest towards a shared identity.
The PPP’s political philosophy still claims to be based on some sort of socialism but, in fact, is founded on a dislike of society and a desire to transform it into something it can control. Hence, policy-makers frequent and boldly utter criticisms against civil society – especially the Amerindian People’s Association; Guyana Bar Association; Guyana Human Rights Association and the Guyana Trades Union Congress. Society for such socialists is valid only if it is composed of others exactly like themselves.
The PPP, if it is to start to transform Guyana into a modern democratic state, must restore its earlier traditions and once more become communal and truly civic. It is only when the PPP embraces the common good that it can escape the authoritarianism that has so badly weakened our national institutions.
