One thing our political leaders do well is articulate how eager they are to work together. They say it so often that one wonders whether they believe the fiction that they spin might fool somebody, anybody, despite the evidence to the contrary.
We see the lie every day. We see it in the impasse in the National Assembly; in the neglect of our capital, towns and villages that has been fomented by the delay in reforming the local government system; and in the absence of a common agenda on national issues, such as police reform, domestic violence, unemployment, corruption, and saving our sugar industry.
Clearly the cooperation rhetoric isn’t solving our problems and it is important that we not only accept that our leaders are willing to work together, but that we hold them to account.
We need to build a Guyana where the pieces of our society are brought together into dialogue about our country’s future, in which each would be able to see the role of the others and the relevance to their own plans (this is our biggest challenge). In other words, we need to move towards a common language and a common programme in how we develop our nation.
The question is what kind of Guyana would we like to see in a few years? Building legislative consensus is important but so is the need to bridge divisions in our society. We live in a country where winning an election and forming the government is taken to mean discounting the other segments of the society – relegating their participation in nation building to a political wilderness.
No administration has all the solutions to a country’s problems and none can claim to either. Our administration is no exception, it can neither claim every capable citizen within its ranks nor attest to having the ability to effectively govern without the combined opposition, civil society and the cooperation of the citizenry.
Therefore, we cannot go on pretending that the kind of democracy we practise here is healthy. We have to acknowledge the failure of authoritative-styled governance to create inclusive democratic governments – to create good governance because good governance is inclusive governance. In essence, good governance has no room for majorities and minorities.
Our political system has to evolve beyond the Westminster model to accommodate full participation across the board. The Westminster model of democracy has for too long excluded a large minority from power during different periods in our country’s history, and its winner-takes-all approach has nurtured and crystallized our ethnic divisions.
To some extent, we can understand why discussions of multi-party governance have been rejected by the current administration. They likely view the current gridlock in the National Assembly as indicative of the kind of problem a grand coalition could engender but as it stands, they are operating in an environment where little political space has been created for the other segments of our society.
We do not need this kind of wretched democracy that breeds distrust and has provided us with remedies such as “agreeing to disagree” in the name of democratic progress. What we need is an arrangement that will build critical consensus by bolstering inter-party cooperation in the political sphere and perhaps at the level of the Cabinet.
We face a series of challenges in our country and the most pressing, I believe, is constructing a social and political system that gives reasonable social and political space to all groups in the society. Essentially, we need an alternative design to a power sharing arrangement.
This is where Northern Ireland could be a useful study and provide us with an interesting institutional innovation used to resolve the conflict: the d’Hondt executive. The idea is, simply, to create a mechanism that guarantees automatic participation of all the different political groups in the Cabinet, with a share proportional to their electoral results.
This is a functional and democratic mechanism which is being promoted in other societies in search for consensus, and may be well worth considering here. Unlike majoritarian political systems such as Westminster, the d’Hondt executive does not operate as a winner-takes-all mechanism; it gives a share in decision-making and responsibility to all groups, especially minorities. The d’Hondt executive is fluid and democratic; no political party is assured a share in power unless it obtains electoral support at the polls; the better they do at the polls, the more they will be rewarded with a larger share.
Conceivably, if our political parties, especially the ruling PPP/C, would agree to a D’Hondt mechanism, executive power would be shared across communities based on how the electorate voted; there would be no need to change the electoral rules. It is not complicated and in fact, favours dominant political parties but at the same time creates political space for smaller parties.
Not only would the dominant party have the first Cabinet pick – which could mean that it stays in control of the President and Prime Ministerial positions (given that the President is directly elected) – but it would also have the largest number of Cabinet seats in a D’Hondt structured Cabinet.
At the same time, other parties which represent a large section of the electorate would join the Cabinet to work in the interests of their constituents both in government and the legislature. What would be left to determine is party preferences with respect to the ministries.
This is what is simple about D’Hondt; there is no need to negotiate how executive power would be shared, it is an automatic process. Instead, the negotiations could likely revolve around party preferences regarding Cabinet picks.
There are, to be sure, critiques to be addressed before presenting this proposal as an element for debate. But a new political arrangement is long overdue; the kind of arrangement that creates the necessary space for all groups to work together; an arrangement that promotes inclusive governance.
It is interesting how the PPP/C continues to regard power sharing as neither desirable nor workable in the context of Guyana yet the party has never consulted its constituency on the issue, more importantly, it has not consulted the citizenry. And why might that be? Probably because the party cannot bear to hear us say that after decades of unbridled entitlement on both sides, power sharing has become a political necessity.
Have a question or comment? Connect with Iana Seales at about.me/iseales
