Two presidents − Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan − who led the local political movement in 1950, seemed set to become presidents for life. They might have continued to seek repeated re-election had they both not died in office.
What part of the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana doesn’t former minister of Parliamentary Affairs and People’s Progressive Party Central Committee member Reepu Daman Persaud comprehend?
Article 90 couldn’t be clearer: “A person elected as President after the year 2000 is eligible for re-election only once.” The incumbent, President Bharrat Jagdeo, was first elected in March 2001 and re-elected once in August 2006. Under the Constitution, as Persaud surely knows, he is ineligible to be re-elected.
The Persaud proposal
Persaud − who served as a member of the National Assembly for 40 years − thinks he can rouse his supporters to change the Constitution. Addressing a large audience, estimated at about 30,000, assembled for the annual Hindu religious Diwali motorcade last month, Persaud who is also President of the Guyana Hindu Dharmic Sabha chose to ignore the sacred nature of the event by sermonizing the congregation with an open call for Jagdeo to be re-elected to a third term.
Pandit Persaud went totally political by pouring praises on Jagdeo for “taking up the challenge to realise major development in many sectors of the economy.” Adopting an intellectually lazy justification that ignores the fact that there must be some talent among the more than 183,000 persons who voted for the party in 2006, he referred to the “leadership vacuum” and suggested that the country would be well set to “move to a higher standard” if Jagdeo was allowed to be re-elected to another term as president. Newspapers reported that the massive crowd of mostly Hindus responded favourably by applauding Persaud’s proposal.
As a proponent of re-election, Persaud seems to have cast himself in the role of an agent of reaction. But the Diwali outburst was not the first occasion on which he peddled his private opinion on the presidency in public. At the PPP’s 39th Congress at Diamond last year, Persaud gratuitously raised the issue of Jagdeo’s ‘third term’ from the floor although the matter was not slated for discussion. No decision was taken but Persaud achieved his objective of placing a non-issue on the agenda and making an impression on party delegates.
It was quite a coincidence that a still unidentified faction of party supporters followed Persaud’s lead. Calling itself the Guyanese Coalition For Jagdeo Third Term, the faction which recently boasted of receiving dollops of cash from the diaspora, started to distribute flyers and buttons promoting the extension of presidential term limits in order to pave the way for Jagdeo to be re-elected.
The flyers, under the caption “We Support a Third Term for Jagdeo,” stated: “We the people of Guyana admire Presi-dent Bharrat Jagdeo for his visionary, courageous and astute leadership over the years. We need Jagdeo to continue the developmental path for a modern, peaceful and prosperous Guyana. In this respect, we are prepared to utilize the constitutional mechanisms to a third term as President of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana.” It ended with the statement: “Jagdeo! Our Choice For 2011”. The button that was distributed carried the words “Jagdeo 3rd Term” printed in red on a white background. Posters were plastered on walls with the slogan, ‘Jagdeo for President in 2011’.
The Ramotar rebuttal
The morning after Persaud’s Diwali declaration, People’s Progressive Party General Secretary Donald Ramotar − himself one of the party’s prospective candidates for the presidency in 2011 − announced that the comments endorsing Jagdeo for a third term did not reflect the party’s position on the issue. Ramotar emphasised that “…the PPP remains with the Constitution. What Mr Persaud said reflected his personal views on the issue and not the party’s position.”
Ramotar also had to denounce the move by the Guyanese Coalition for Jagdeo Third Term which started to campaign for a third term for Jagdeo. He pointedly refuted allegations that the PPP might have been behind the silent campaign. Taken with Persaud’s vocalization of an identical intention, the ‘Coalition’ has raised fears that the campaign to amend the constitution to remove term limits might be gathering momentum.
This has posed a personal problem for Ramotar and a political dilemma for the party and he wants to stop the trend in its tracks. He issued a statement that the PPP noted the campaign by unidentified persons for an amendment to the Constitution to remove the term limit for a President of the Republic.
The party iterated that “the Constitution is clear, in that a President is entitled to two terms in office.” The PPP viewed the campaign as “mischievous, designed to create confusion and division among people,” given Jagdeo’s repeated denials of having an interest in contesting the presidency for a third time. The party said it fully supported the proposal for term limits before the Constitutional Reform Commission.
The Jagdeo denial
For his part, President Jagdeo has repeatedly denied that he intended to seek re-election. Last October, he groaned “I’ve dealt with that issue a hundred times. My position is clear on it. I’m not dealing with it again. I’ve dealt with it a hundred times, my position stands.” When the issue was raised at a recent dinner with the private sector, Jagdeo restated that the matter was one which had been subject to much speculation. “I have no interest in another term… all that speculation out there is just that, speculation. The media has been in a frenzy.”
Speculation continued, nevertheless, and there is no doubt that something substantial is stirring. Jagdeo is the longest serving president and might see himself as a statesman of international stature and as a man of destiny to lead the nation for years to come. He is today’s idol for a party that is looking for a charismatic champion who could lead the party to victory against opposition parties and a luminary to replace the fabled Cheddi Jagan. A personality cult – generated by compliant state media and nourished by the scores of adulatory articles, documentaries, placards, posters, pamphlets and billboards – flourishes.
On the darker side, there have been disturbing indicators. The concentration of power in the president’s hands and the cumulative effect of the absence of dialogue with the opposition, the denunciation of certain elements in the press and business community and the enfeeblement of trade unions could result in long-term damage to the very democratic institutions the party boasted of safeguarding over the past sixty years.
This democratic deficit has become both evident and expensive. In the elections for which Jagdeo was presidential candidate, the party’s tally of the popular vote fell from about 220,000 in 1997, to 210,000 in 2001 and 183,000 in 2006. The trend is clear: despite the hype, the president and the party are becoming less, not more, popular. By alienating more mature members of his party and respected citizens in the wider society, he might be on his way to becoming an electoral liability rather than an asset.
Worst of all, the mishandling of the recurrent environmental problems that caused catastrophic flooding and the mismanagement of the security crisis – both of which plagued his presidency almost from the start – have impeded investment and restricted growth. United States Department of State and other international reports repeatedly paint unflattering pictures of a weak state caught in a web of narcotics-trafficking, corruption and criminal violence.
The Ramkarran reminder
Speaker of the National Assembly and PPP executive member Ralph Ramkarran recently joined the debate on the re-election of the president. As the former Chairman of the Guyana Constitution Reform Commis-sion, he was at pains to point out that it was by a majority of 12 to 4, across party lines, that the recommendation was made that “a person shall hold the office of president for a maximum of two terms and those terms shall be consecutive.” He wrote that “the Bill that came to the National Assembly limited the terms to two but did not provide for them to be consecutive. The Bill was supported by both political parties and is now law.”
Ramkarran, who like Ramotar is not unlikely to seek the party’s nomination to be its presidential candidate in 2011, also has a personal interest in term limits. He explained that “Guyana’s experience which led to the imposition of term limits had to do with its experience and history. The era of the ‘Big Man’ in politics, both in Guyana and Africa, was coming to an end by the 1990s. It was felt that provision should be made to ensure that leaders should not be allowed to remain in office indefinitely in view of the tendency towards authoritarian rule, even where these leaders were elected democratically.”
He emphasized that other countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean – which had no real experience of ‘Big Man’ politics as in Guyana – would find it difficult to appreciate the strong support for term limits “Without the experience of the hubristic attitude, stagnant economy and corrupt behaviour that lifetime or even long-term leadership of a country can bring, even where electoral democracy prevails.”
Older folk might still nourish nostalgia for the long-serving Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan who led the People’s National Congress and People’s Progressive Party, respectively. But these ‘Big men’ were both creatures of their times and worked themselves to exhaustion and death in office. It became evident that their socialistic, post-colonial ideologies which were effective in mobilizing the masses in the struggle for independence were inadequate to transform a backward colony into a competitive, capitalistic modern economy. The longer they remained in office, the harder they tried to apply their obsolete remedies to new problems.
Jagdeo is not a visionary like Burnham or Jagan. Nor is he a dictator in the mould of Korea’s Kim Jong Il or Cuba’s Fidel Castro. There is an opposition press and freeish elections are held every five years. But, after ten years in office, the country has seen his best… and his worst. Guyana needs new leadership – not another president for life – in order to move forward. Let the Constitu-tion stand.