Over drinks and being boisterous as is customary when we are in the throes of what we tell ourselves are fundamental political quarrels, a few well-educated friends and I began contemplating the current persistent suggestion that our current political problems are largely the result of the absence of leadership in the ruling generation and a corollary that our salvation lies with our young people taking government. I promised to publicly recall the more important of our conclusions.
Maybe because of our average age of about sixty years, apart from the obvious context that the current generation will definitely be replaced by the coming ones, we quickly pounce upon and dismiss the notion that the nation’s salvation lies with its youth. We concluded that if anything, this position is indicative of the political hopelessness in which we have found ourselves. As Karl Marx argued in relation to religion, it is no more than a cry for hope in hopeless conditions.
Cheddi Jagan was 29 years old when he entered the Legislative Assembly and was only 33 years of age which he became the first premier of Guyana. Forbes Burnham was only 28 years when he entered Jagan’s first government and together they made a hash of things. They clearly lacked that ingredient that comes with age: experience.
They did not properly understand their political context believing that, in the age of containment and by appealing to some concept of ‘democracy,’ they were going to be allowed to establish radical Marxism on the American continent. In numerous practical ways (the October 2013 Venezuelan seizure of the Teknik Perdana) we are still living with their errors. Having returned to office in 1992 Jagan referred to some of his earlier actions as expressions of “youthful exuberance.”
In any case, some five decades later, President Bharrat Jagdeo came to government at the age of 35 and in some circles he represented a new generation and great expectations. However, by the time he completed his second term in 2011 many of the same persons were complaining that his reign was arguably worse than the ‘infamous’ Forbes Burnham.
Our group did not think it is sensible to believe that there is some variable which would make a youthful government necessarily a better one or that an elderly government necessarily needs to be worse. Desmond Hoyte, now considered by many as, at least, one of our better presidents was 56 years old when he came to government and Cheddi Jagan was 74 when he returned much more sober; even suggesting that he had changed and was “Gorbachev long before Gorbachev.”
Internationally, Deng Xiaoping was 74 years of age when he began to lead the transformation that has made China the power it is today.
So we concluded that while youthful hope and energy are important in any consideration of leadership, they are by no means decisive. What is preferable in a leader is the proper combination of practical rationality (“President Ramotar: the absence of ‘practical reason:” SN: 02/10/13), experience and energy.
The other important question we had to contemplate is the relationship between leadership and the social structures.
This is fundamental because Guyana is a bicommunal society in which there are two large ethnic groups. Other such societies are: Fiji, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Malaysia and possibly Iraq. These societies are notoriously difficult to govern and with the possible exception of Malaysia, are all in some level of political turmoil (“The contention that shared governance does not and cannot work is false:” SN: 29/06/11). Do they all lack adequate leadership?
It would appear that the ethnic structures of these societies encourage the kind of political opportunism which usually put to severe political disadvantage any person or group which seeks to run against the grain of an ethnic focus. In our case the AFC is a good example. Try as it may it remains essentially as a stopping place for ethnic groups disillusioned with the parties that have traditionally represented them.
There is a tendency to complain that the PPP is intransigent without realizing that for its leadership to survive, it could only sensibly compromise in a framework which allows it to claim that it is still the bulwark protecting the ethnic interest. To compromise in a manner that gives its ethnic constituency the impression that it is being dismantled as a protective shield is to court political disaster. This is compounded by the fact that after two decades of rule a sufficient number of its supporters are naturally weary with the current leadership and are prepared to seek salvation elsewhere.
Although it is possible to argue that, if proper leadership is present, structures can be found, as perhaps in some form of shared governance arrangement, even this avenue may have been blocked by the current party’s behaviour in government (“The PPP has far more questions to answer:” SN: 23/07/14).
It would appear that whatever leadership difficulties may exist, it is the structural problem that is largely responsible for our being in the political and economic doldrums. But we also detected a leadership problem: not in terms of the absence of the capacity to lead but more akin to the nature of that capacity.
Guyana has never been a democracy in any meaningful manner. The colonial system experience was definitely not; broadly speaking, the PNC’s and PPP/C’s regimes are different levels of autocracies based on rigged elections and race respectively.
All those who have lived in Guyana consistently (attendance of educational institutions abroad for a few is treated as still being in Guyana) have experienced only autocratic rule. When this is added to the general dictatorial conditioning which exists in most families, apart from some theoretical appreciation, as we have seen only recently, our present rulers all come to their task with an autocratic impulse: most unqualified to manage a democracy.
We concluded that proper weight needs to be given to structure, leadership and the need for youthful energy if we are to progress. However, the leadership orientation we highlighted above will remain a problem in any circumstance and can become very pernicious if ever we decide to establish anything resembling coalition or shared government.
Thus, perhaps at this stage Guyana requires some foreign management and we should recruit more of our political leaders from the diaspora! That is, inject into our political leadership a reasonable number of Guyanese who are about 45 and below 65 years of age; have been reasonably well educated and have significant (15 years) living and working experience in upper level positions in foreign, preferably liberal democratic, countries.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
