It is generally believed that the presidency of Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo constituted one of the most autocratic periods in the post-independence political history of Guyana in spite of the fact that he did not have control of both the government and the PPP the way Cheddi and Janet Jagan did. Throughout his term, Mr. Jagdeo faced substantial opposition within the ranks of the PPP. This became most public in the form of the positions taken by Messrs. Moses Nagamootoo and Navin Chandarpal. Nevertheless, given the nature of our constitution and especially his control of state resources/patronage, President Jagdeo was able to run roughshod over the PPP. Today, some of the very people who were most vociferous in their condemnation of Mr. Jagdeo’s reach and power are now contemplating uniting government and party leadership in the PNC! Is it any wonder that many believe that all the talk about the need for openness and democracy we hear from our politicians is essentially opportunistic and meant only to apply to the other side?
The PPP and the PNC more or less belonged to their founder leaders who were, for the most part, intellectually secured and sophisticated. They recognised the need for discourse and debate if they were to maintain the respect and loyalty of their colleagues, even if at the end of the day they generally got their way.
I was, for example, once involved in writing an ideological document for the PNC, and one Sunday morning President Forbes Burnham called a meeting of the party/government hierarchy at the Ogle management centre to discuss the completed draft product. The discussion went well, as changes were made to the document, but by my recollection, there was one issue – my inclusion of a certain Caribbean leader in the general pantheon of socialist leaders – with which Burnham obviously disagreed, although he neither mentioned the leader nor became involved in a personal attack upon him. Myself and others argued against his position and what should have been a four or five hour meeting went into the late afternoon. Dr. Ptolemy Reid eventually took the bull by the horns and said that since Burnham was the leader, rather than keep on repeating ourselves, if he wanted the section out of the document it should be taken out. Again, Burnham never said that the section should be removed, but made a comment about the perceptiveness of Dr. Reid, and the reference was removed.
Similarly, Cheddi was a born polemicist, who appeared to actually believe that, even in our bi-communal society, he could convince people of the sense and fairness of his position. We would accompany him and his chalkboard to places like Stabroek market as he tried to explain the complicated relationship between GDP growth, salaries and the cost of living to various categories of working men and women! I for one thought that he was pressing the envelope but no doubt it was this grass-root approach that attracted the respect of ordinary people of all races. If the truth be told, Cheddi Jagan’s cabinet meetings were intolerably interminable, with arguments and counter arguments coming from all sides. He even went as far as rotating the chairpersonship of cabinet among the various ministers!
During negotiations with the trade union movement for trade union recognition legislation, which had proved an intractable issue for four decades and contributed to the downfall of two PPP regimes, on many occasions when I made a proposal that appeared sensible to me, the venerable trade union leader Joseph Pollydore consistently reminded me that we should guard against making rules that depend upon “good people” for their effective and equitable implementation. Whether or not Burnham and Jagan were good people as such will continue to be debated, but because of their individual perspectives their parties and governments were more open. With presidents Janet Jagan and Jagdeo we had less open types which the system was not designed to thwart.
The mere fact of being in government places tremendous resources in the hands of the president, so that even when faced with substantial opposition in the party, s/he is still able to wield substantial leverage over his/her colleagues, who for the most part are all looking to her/him for state patronage of various sorts. Those who are now asking President Donald Ramotar to assert himself within the general scheme of governance may come to rue the day they made such a request if the party structure remains unchanged. Mr. Ramotar may not be the formal leader of the PPP and the general secretary-ship of that party does not carry the same weight as it does in normal communist parties, but combined with the presidency it contains ominous possibilities.
There are those who will want to argue that there is a world of a difference between the power of the president who controls the ruling party and that of an opposition leader who controls the major minority party. Quite apart from the fact that an election may easily change that relationship, the opposition leader’s power is quite substantial. S/he could have dominant influence on party appointments to state boards, parliamentary committees, regional chairpersonships and other regional positions, etc. For this power not to become excessively autocratic within the present structure, we will have to depend on his/her essential goodness, and as Pollydore warned, this is not a sensible way of doing business: institutionalized checks and balances are preferable.
Many other reasons are given why the two positions in the PNC should not be united. For example, over the last few weeks I have been pressing the need to reduce the power of oligarchies in our political parties, and the creation of diarchic leadership, which differentiates the leadership of government from that of the party, has been suggested as one method in the literature on oligarchy.
What I have said about the PNC in relation to leadership differentiation can just as easily be said of the PPP, and all too often political choices are rooted in individual self-interest while claims are made of their being in the national interest. But all too often is not always, and perhaps in the current PNC leadership competition the national interest will prevail.
