From the look of things this year’s general elections campaign may well be characterized by the customary verbal vitriol to which we have grown accustomed over the years and which, during previous general elections campaigns, has served to subsume manifesto commitments beneath the din of word-throwing and name-calling on the hustings. This pattern has been an integral part of pre-elections confrontations, particularly between the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), over the years. The assumption that appears to have underpinned this approach to elections campaigns is that it is the extent to which voters can be persuaded to revile one party or another rather than the merits of their respective manifestos that determines support at the polls. There are those who have suggested that the mathematics of ethnicity renders that approach a favoured one for the ruling party.
In the period that followed the 1992 general elections, we were led to believe that we were in the mode of putting behind us the electoral demons of the past. Rigged elections come immediately to mind. What also comes to mind are race-driven political campaigns, elections-related violence and crude character assassinations of candidates at the hustings. Indeed, what our experience of previous elections campaigns has taught is that the creation of a charged environment arising out of sustained verbal hostility can give way to violence. The ruling party, particularly, has repeatedly told us that December 1992 was a turning point in our political culture and that part of its focus – in the context of the return to democracy – was on the creation of different norms of political behaviour, including an elections environment characterized by a more generous measure of civility and emphasis on what political parties had to offer the nation rather than the persistence of empty and dangerous ethnically-charged rhetoric.
We now know that that may well not be the case. If the indications that have emerged from President Bharrat Jagdeo’s recent Babu John speech in a community where the ruling party has traditionally secured much of its electoral support are anything to go by, we may well be in for more harsh invective that has characterized previous general elections. Here, it should be made clear that there is a distinction to be made between criticisms and forms of behaviour coming from the political parties and their leaders that do a disservice to the nation, and crude and often entirely unsubstantiated personal attacks.
The tone and content of what the President had to say at Babu John has attracted the dubious sobriquet ‘cuss out,’ specifically for the reason that it contained a generous measure of alarming personal attacks. Evidently, the President’s remarks were deliberate, measured and designed to evoke strong feelings of prejudice against individuals – not political parties but individuals – expected to oppose the PPP/C at the forthcoming general elections. Brigadier (rtd) David Granger, who, just recently, was elected as the PNCR’s presidential nominee, appeared to have been the prime target of those attacks.
The President may well argue that even if a large section of the population found some of what he had to say downright distasteful, he was speaking to an audience comprising traditional PPP/C supporters and, moreover, that his behaviour was consistent with the pattern of verbal free-for-all that has long been part of our elections culture; except, of course, that we have heard endless pronouncements from his party, particularly, about the desirability of putting the old ways behind us. What the President had to say at Babu John is altogether inconsistent with his party’s professed desire for a changed elections culture. Indeed, the President himself went beyond the boundaries of robust but entirely acceptable elections campaigning that characterizes political behaviour in decent democracies and ventured into the realm of harmful hype that could set the tone for a confrontational general elections campaign.
Bharrat Jagdeo is the longest serving President in Guyana’s history and, not unexpectedly, he has, during his tenure, attracted both staunch supporters and uncompromising detractors. That is as it is in democratic societies. Those considerations, however, have nothing to do with the unquestioned fact of the legitimacy of his presidency and the attendant expectation that his understandable loyalty to his own political party would not cause him to lose sight of his overarching responsibility to set the best possible example for the nation as a whole. That responsibility, most decidedly, includes providing the kind of national leadership that seeks to ensure that our elections are conducted in the most convivial environment possible.
One suspects that at least two significant and potentially harmful developments are likely to flow from what the President had to say at Babu John. The PNCR has already fired its own retaliatory salvo and it is not unlikely that it might sustain the same vitriolic posture as part of its own elections campaign. For its part, the PPP/C’s campaign may now have little choice but to follow the President’s Babu John lead and to dish out more of the same in the weeks and months ahead. The 2011 general elections campaign has gotten off to a worryingly cantankerous start and if the truth be told the President can take much of the credit for that.
