While normally during the parliamentary recess in August and September there is a kind of political intermission, that is not quite the case this year. It is all because a general election might be written in our immediate future, although exactly when it will come and who will ‘call’ it cannot yet be read in the tea leaves. This does not mean that the population has moved into election mode; the cynicism cum apathy quotient among the electorate is high – higher even than the last time around. However, some of the politicians have been easing themselves into a pre-campaign routine and have proved quite voluble.
In terms of revealing their innermost thoughts, the PPP is usually closed up tighter than the proverbial clam. They deliver themselves of no end of platitudes, polemic, rationalisations, invective and the like, from which motivations and thinking can be inferred, but generally they divulge little which would allow a direct insight into their thought processes. But last week the shell was prised open a fraction, and the populus was permitted a glimpse of the views which might be circulating within Freedom House.
The first clues came from General Secretary of the PPP, Mr Clement Rohee, who with his weekly press conferences has been sounding exactly like a trouper on the hustings, except that on this occasion, he had something over and above his customary vilification of perceived opponents to communicate to the assembled journalists. He told them that the PPP had been meeting “with various stakeholders and interest groups to discuss the political situation and the need for more to be done to realize the establishment of this broad National Democratic Front Alliance.”
Exactly who the party had been talking to was not disclosed, but he said the front was a political framework which would advance democracy in Guyana through a partnership of Guyanese who were also committed to the party’s vision. That this framework was not of the same order as the shared governance APNU had in mind was made clear by the fact that Mr Rohee launched into an attack on the main opposition party, accusing them of diminishing any hope of shared governance.
The report in our Tuesday edition also went on to quote him as demanding that APNU “stop its pretence of national unity and… join the national conversation towards the establishment of a broad National Democratic Front with the aim of advancing Guyana’s development.” Well this is all a bit confusing, more especially since the General Secretary also was reported as saying that for shared governance a sense of trust between the parties was essential.
Consistency, of course, has never been a virtue of any of our political parties, but a translation of Mr Rohee’s apparent contradictions indicates firstly, that the party has been discussing the shared governance problematic; secondly, that it doesn’t really want shared governance but realizes it is at a disadvantage on this front with respect to what APNU is offering, more especially since it might be looking at another plurality after the next poll; and thirdly, given the circumstances it feels the need to propose something which looks like shared governance, but which isn’t. So what exactly are we talking about? The General Secretary it turned out was quite open about that one: it is something akin to the Civic arm when the PPP first came into office in 1992.
It might be remarked that however one defines shared governance – and in our context there are several possible definitions – it does not include a Civic-style appendage tacked on to the fabric of a ruling party. Will the voters be deceived into thinking otherwise? It is highly unlikely considering that the Civic arrangement of 1992 fizzled like a damp squib, and that it no longer exists as a concept. Those Civic members who still survive in the government are indistinguishable from the PPP, and may well be considered dispensable when the next election comes around. Why should it be thought, therefore, that genuinely independent minds will be seduced into joining the PPP, or that even if they were they would fare any differently from their predecessors? Whatever shared or inclusive government means, it is not ‘Civic.’
The following day, Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon, went a great deal further than Mr Rohee and matter-of-factly told reporters that minority governments were probably here to stay. It was a statement which hardly needs any further explication in terms of its significance, although whether it represents his personal opinion or the accepted view in Freedom House is not clear. That the former might conceivably be the case became apparent when on Friday President Donald Ramotar said that the PPP would regain the majority following new elections.
Other possibilities for the discrepancy are that either there are factions within the PPP which are not in agreement on the outcome another election is likely to bring, and the President is associated with one of them and the HPS with another; or alternatively, Mr Ramotar was in pure propaganda mode when he spoke and not of a mind to give glimpses of party thinking.
For his part Dr Luncheon referred to the need to place emphasis on making minority governments work, and he also was reported as saying that electoral alliances would remain a feature of electoral strategies in Guyana as elsewhere. Whether his views are somewhat ahead of where the party think tank is currently located is difficult to say, but at the very least it seems as if the PPP is being forced to contemplate possible scenarios they have previously never had to consider. Furthermore, they are tentatively attempting some kind of response to those scenarios, however inadequate it might be. In sum, there does seem to be some flutter of movement in their traditional stance, although whether in the end this will be sustained and they will move far enough or radically enough to produce a real change of outlook where our political framework is concerned, is another matter entirely.
The PPP did not have all the political space to themselves last week; yesterday we reported APNU Leader David Granger as inviting the AFC to come under its umbrella for the next election. An AFC executive, however, told this newspaper that joining APNU “would defeat our purpose and we risk losing our support base.” Nothing daunted, Mr Granger reiterated his shared governance proposal: “Even if the AFC does not join prior to the election I would include them in the governing of the country. Read my lips, I am serious. This country needs a different attitude for governance… [We] must move away from this thinking of majority government.”
Exactly how this would work out in practical terms has not been spelt out by any of the players, least of all by Mr Granger, and outside the active political arena only Dr Henry Jeffrey in his ‘Future Notes’ column in Stabroek News has been engaging in any kind of detailed discussion about what the implications of the various shared governance models are, with Mr Ralph Ramkarran in his Sunday column also making some contributions.
While it is true that no general election date has been named yet, the politicians on all sides appear committed to a poll before the due date in 2016. As such, therefore, there is some on-the-ground campaigning going on, certainly on the part of the governing party and to some extent, the AFC. Where the public discussions are concerned, however, the current exchanges are almost unique in our more recent political history since some of them seem to be taken up with what to all intents and purposes are constitutional issues (even if not explicitly described as such) premised on the assumption that demographic shifts will deliver fundamental changes to our political universe.
It is possible therefore that in among the usual nonsense put to the electorate in campaigns, this time the political parties may also include something about how they see our political framework evolving, more particularly since we might be looking at minority governments in the future. What they have to say may or may not be useful in the long run, but the important thing is it will be the first indication to the voters of their openness to genuine reform of our political straitjacket.
