Context is everything and with the defeat of Janet Jagan in 1999, the political context in Guyana changed into the debilitating, acrimonious and anti-developmental environment we now inhabit. I believe that unless we understand what I will call here the Janet Jagan Effect, we will be unable to properly grasp where we are today. We will continue, for example, with the false dichotomy between the regimes of Presidents Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramotar and not be able to make sensible proposals to extricate ourselves from the current morass.
A few initial points are important. When I speak here of context, I am not saying that there exists a concrete or generally acceptable notion of a given context. On the contrary, context is a social construction: it is what one makes of one’s social conditions and depends on many factors, but essentially on one’s ideology and intellectual capacity. Secondly, in my view and notwithstanding all the public shenanigans, Ms. Jagan kept effective control of the PPP until she died.
Henry Ford once said: “If there is any secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from you own.” President Obama has also said that: “The way I think about interacting with people generally is to find out what it is they are thinking, to give them a sense of what I’m thinking, and then to try to synthesize and try to find the truth that lies between people” (“To better understand other negotiators, consider the context;” March 2013, Negotiation, Harvard Law School). With hindsight and retrospective bias, this is precisely what we will attempt with the PPP and more specifically Ms. Jagan.
Finally, as we have seen in the last two articles, by the late 1990s the labour agenda had moved forward but more remained to be done. Historically, labour relations have been and still are a highly charged political activity and as a practical example I will attempt, in a following article, to use them to demonstrate the negative impact of the Janet Jagan Effect.
The following are some of the important variables of the context in which Ms. Jagan found herself. Firstly on the death of Cheddi Jagan, constitutionally Prime Minister Samuel Hinds became president on the understanding that he would serve out the term and that a PPP candidate would become the presidential candidate at the next elections. Given the general understanding between the PPP and the Civic, this was in my view a morally correct position. However, in our divided society, this manoeuvre only served to reinforce the racist nature of the PPP in the minds of many.
Following this, even after she was alerted to the level of animosity that the African section of the population felt against her, Ms. Jagan most unwisely decided to run for the presidency. She was not unaware of this historic dislike and the fact that she proceeded to run for the presidency suggests a deficient understanding of governance; a notion that viewed the right to govern and to be obeyed as essentially the outcrop of the capacity to win a majority. Of course, winning a bare majority does not create the level of legitimacy that is required to sensibly manage a bi-communal society and when she won the elections all hell broke loose!
Her secret presidential inauguration must have been most humiliating for someone who believed that she had laboured all her life for the very people from which she was now hiding. That frustration boiled over when at the following public event legal efforts were still being made to prevent her presidency and her throwing away of the Court order served to further doom her presidency. To this day, notwithstanding her apology and explanation, that event is regarding as typifying what was wrong with the Janet Jagan presidency.
In normal conditions the political process is extremely unkind: in our situation is it brutal. From almost its inception, the PPP, the Jagans and particularly Janet Jagan, had come in for serious abuse. Now, even with the “return of democracy” there appeared no end in sight and Ms. Jagan’s problems had just begun!
The protest, led by the PPP’s historic enemy the PNC, continued and in the first month of 1998 her besieged regime was forced into the Herdmanston Accord, which took off two years from her term of office. This did not however stop the political unrest; the PNC boycotted parliament and by mid-1998, Ms. Jagan had to sign a St. Lucia Statement, which served to reinforce the commitments made about constitutional reform, etc. This was followed, in the first months of 1999, by a destructive public service strike and in August 1999 – not surprisingly in the above context – Ms Jagan resigned for “health” reasons!
It is easy to berate people yet fail to find sensible solutions if you do not sensibly appreciate their context. As I said earlier, in the case of Janet Jagan her notion of ruler-ship was based on an essentially instrumentalist notion of legitimacy as majority rule. Indeed, that is still essentially the position of the PPP and a large portion of its followers. To her, what took place during her presidency was unfair and perverse and simply continued the historical abuse the PPP has had to suffer as a result of PNC bullyism!
Thus, when Ms. Jagan moved from New Garden Street to Freedom House she moved with an outlook that told her that working with the opposition, and in particular with the PNC, was impossible. What, therefore, was left? The answer was – and is – dominance!
After all, it was/is either the PPP or the PNC who would/will dominate and with government in its hands the PPP would/will hardly allow the latter! Given the behaviour of the PNC and its supporters, talk of shared governance etc, were/are seen simply as means of re-establishing PNC treachery and dominance.
Until trust is built within a framework of PPP dominance, we must be content with such “inclusive governance” as is possible. The essential difficulty with this conceptualization is that the maintenance of dominance is diametrically opposed to the building of trust!
