On Friday the Guyana Human Rights Association described the PPP/C as being in denial over the November 28 election results. There is probably no more pithy way of putting it; the protest drama, the barrage of propaganda about the budget cuts, the meetings across the country and the contrived arguments, are all evidence that the government believes it is being denied its ‘right’ to the exercise of untrammelled power. It deeply resents the combined opposition’s one-seat majority in the legislature, the implications of which it appears incapable of accepting.
This psychological block was probably responsible in the first instance for the extraordinary claim made by the President that the PNCR had rigged the elections; it supplied the first indication that a mental barrier was preventing the penetration of reality into the party consciousness. If the election was fraudulent, then the PPP/C could claim the right to continue as it had always done, and as such it prepared the budget as though it were in possession of an overall majority. It then moved on to its stratagem of splitting the opposition and dealing with APNU alone, a stratagem which it has not yet abandoned, although more recently it has been attempted through a surrogate in the form of the Private Sector Commission, some of whose executives are not above behaving as if they represent the government, rather than the business community.
Apart from that, as mentioned above, there has been the bizarre shepherding of public servants out onto the streets to protest cuts which are directed not against them, but against the highly paid contract workers who are undermining the public service as a whole. Then there is the even more aberrant clamour from the state media about being denied freedom of expression – something which they themselves, it might be noted, could never be accused of according anyone whose views do not reflect received opinion from Freedom House or OP. For all their efforts, it is likely that city dwellers, and possibly those along the coast too, looked on this public pantomime with a cynical eye, since they are closer to events and have a grasp of what obtains, but no doubt the PPP/C’s forays into the interior have received a better hearing, because the Amerindians are removed from everyday politics and do not have access to a variety of information sources or opinions.
The question is, however, what is the ultimate purpose of all of this effort and expenditure? What do they hope to achieve by it, and how will it assist them in the governance of the country? The short answer is, of course, it won’t. The only rational explanation would seem to be that they have decided to call a snap election and they are preparing the ground in advance. It has been suggested by the AFC that all the references to a snap election on the part of the governing party are merely a bluff, but if that is so, it still leaves open the question of what on earth they are doing. Certainly, budget cuts or no, an election at this stage would seem to be a high-risk enterprise, unless Freedom House’s estrangement from reality is more complete than even their most militant critics suspected. And in any case, even if, for the sake of argument, the President were to call an election now, it certainly isn’t going to come off in the next few months for a whole variety of reasons. And in the meantime, what would they be proposing to do? This nation cannot live in a state of a perpetual general election campaign; some governing would have to go on, and automatically at the level of the legislature that would involve the opposition.
One cannot help but feel that the governing party has no idea what it is doing at the moment, or what it should be doing in the circumstances. Its state of denial, as the GHRA has called it, means that it cannot wrap its mind around what its options are for proceeding. No one knows what its policies will be, or if it has any, and if it does, how it proposes to move forward with those given its minority status in Parliament. The PPP/C came into office in early December 2011 after being in government for nineteen years, and up to this point almost six months later, it has not outlined its vision for the nation, or, as mentioned earlier, its programme for the next five years. The only thing the public is hearing is its denigration of the opposition, who are the only ones at the moment who give the appearance of having some kind of parliamentary agenda. This lack of coherence, lack of direction and general confusion on the part of the PPP/C about what its intentions should be, would not be the kind of record likely to win over voters in the event that a snap election is indeed what is lurking at the back of its collective mind.
What Freedom House does not know, any more than does APNU or the AFC, is whether the November 28th election was just a blip on Guyana’s political screen, or whether it represents the beginning of a radical shift in our politics. If it is the latter, then the party’s absolutist style of government is not just passé – which in terms of other democracies it has been for a very long time – but will be rejected by the electorate consistently in the future. Even if the last election was a temporary blip, the odds are that as an increasing number of younger voters come onto the electoral roll in the future, it will be recognized as a harbinger of longer-term change. In other words, while theoretically, the PPP/C may be able to return to an overall majority the next time around, they will not be able to sustain that majority for any lengthy period; time is against them.
Groups which have enjoyed varying degrees of absolute power relinquish their grip on it with the greatest reluctance, and are invariably the last to recognize that the ground has shifted beneath them. Before the government and the ruling party can concentrate their minds on how to function in this new environment, they first have to accept that there is a new environment. They have too to recognize that in some form or another, this is the shape of the future, and that even if it is interrupted by an interlude of an overall majority, that is merely a temporary phenomenon.
There are now two loci of power: the Office of the President and the Parliament. Negotiating the way forward will not be easy, but negotiation is the name of the game. For the sake of the nation, the government should stop the circus, and sit down and work out its policy agenda. After that, it needs to try its hand at a bit of consultation, discussion and compromise. It is the shape of things to come.
