Dear Editor,
If Guyanese and the world had any doubt about the dictatorial orientation and nature of the current PPP regime, I hope the President’s use of the heavy hammer to pound all of us would erase such doubts. Today we rightfully mourn another death blow to our right to be free people in a free Guyana. But, let’s be real—we look fuh that. The parliamentary majority parties must bear equal responsibility for where we have arrived. Politics is also about engagement at multiple levels. If you accept that your only engagement would be traditional parliamentary action and dialogue with the President with no recourse to checks and balances in the form of, for example, a robust parliamentary agenda aimed at reconfiguring the political architecture along with active judicial review and mass action and mobilization, then you are simply reinforcing the status quo.
Both the PPP and parliamentary majority treated the historic 2011 election results as normal and engaged as if nothing had changed. The truth is that the results handed the country a scenario that challenged the leaders to think, act and govern in a new way. Divided government in such circumstances means joint government and all parties have a constitutional and political duty to ensure that that is enforced.
But for three years the leaders of the parliamentary majority led their supporters down the wrong road and as loyal followers they tried to make sense out of what was clearly not making sense. From the beginning, some of us felt it was a mistake to allow a minority government to govern as a majority. Such an approach legitimized a government that by its very definition lacked legitimacy. Legitimacy of a government is conferred not only by the constitution, but, more importantly, by the belief of the vast majority of the people that the government has the moral and political right to govern.
The leaders of the parliamentary majority, against the wishes of their constituencies, gave their stamp of approval to the PPP minority government. They retreated into the role of traditional opposition when the circumstance dictated that we were not. They gave the executive branch unlimited space to govern as if it were the creature of a super-majority. They allowed the PPP to dictate the agenda. They allowed themselves to be bogged down in endless, fruitless dialogue. They stubbornly refused to mobilize the people to exercise their constitutional and human right to resist government over-reach. Their parliamentary behaviour, except for the budget cuts and a boycott of Minister Rohee, lacked the cutting edge of an empowered majority.
In short, they cuddled a government that showed scant respect for the rule of law. They ceded their right to share in the governance of the country. And this is the thanks they got—the suspension of the parliament. As Brother Bob Marley observed—“Hate is your reward for our Love.”
Only recently, I drew attention to the non-strategy behind the no-confidence vote. Clearly our lawyers knew of the President’s option to prorogue the parliament. But by not preempting the President’s latest action, the AFC and APNU obviously didn’t believe the PPP would go down that road. In politics, you cannot predict every act of your opponents. But the PPP is an open book when it comes to the politics of domination. Listen carefully to the recent conversation between the Attorney General and the journalist, which was exposed by the Kaieteur News, and you will hear the extent to which the PPP’s praxis is grounded in the notion of racial superiority, the criminalization of the state and the divine right to govern Guyana. The Attorney General’s remarks became the perfect introduction to the President’s announcement of the suspension of Parliament.
Now that Parliament has been suspended, the people’s representatives have in effect been dismissed by the President. They have no formal forum to represent the interests of their constituencies. They have been put out on the streets—the very streets that for three years they avoided like the plague. The President and his cabinet and party are the sole rulers of Guyana. They have crowned themselves the dictators of the country; that is what they have always wanted. They have subverted the constitution. They can no longer hold on to the mantle of democracy; it’s an illusion.
When the door to democratic contestation is slammed in your face, you are left with no other option than to purposefully push it open. The President says he
subverted the democratic process to prevent obstruction of government and to bring the opposition to the table. What rubbish! The parliamentary opposition parties have been at the table for three years. And the right to obstruct crude and cruel governance is a sacred one. Truth be told, the AFC and APNU have not done a quarter of the obstruction they should be doing. In the end it was the President and his cabinet who did all the obstructing.
The APNU and AFC have been focusing on elections as the grand solution to the PPP dictatorship. Such an approach is attractive, but if those elections are conceived outside of a larger political solution we would be merely reinventing the wheel. In 1992 after the long and sometimes bloody struggle for the removal of the then dictatorial government, we reduced democracy to elections. It was mistake. We boasted of free and fair elections, but we left the draconian constitution in place and didn’t settle the age-old ethnic problem. The end result has been a government that is ten times worse than the one we replaced. Political rights, political solution and democracy cannot be confined to local government and general elections, important though the latter are. Much more than that is needed to root out the scourge of dictatorship that has dogged Guyana for all of its independence experience. We have replaced Colonial domination win Post-Colonial domination. And this PPP government represents the worst of that phenomenon.
Guyana has had twenty-two years of the PPP’s bullying. Bullies do not respond to dialogue as strategy. Bullies only respond to dialogue when they know you are prepared to fight back. The PPP will continue to batter us until our leaders show some resolve to wage a relentless struggle to set the crooked ways straight and unambiguously declare in word and deed the Kwayana dictum—This Confounded Nonsense Must Stop. So the ball is in the APNU and AFC court.
Yours faithfully,
David Hinds
