Much of the public response to the arrival by APNU and the AFC at an agreement that the two will contest the May 11 general elections as a coalition has had to do with the recurring theme of change, transformation that goes beyond simply the replacing of one political party in office with another; one that has the far greater, more worthwhile ambition of replacing an old and debilitating political order. That is the nature of the change that is being talked about.
If it is still way too early to predict the longer-term implications of the coalition we are at least entitled to hope – and to do so fervently – that it might be a precursor to eventually putting our historic differences aside in the interest of greater good, in other words, delivering what a great many people are hoping for.
We must be mindful to put this in perspective. Far from being some heaven-sent national consensus on a collective readiness to break decisively with the curse of largely race-driven politics and get ahead with building this nation together, what the formation of a coalition suggests is that we may be readier than we have ever been to start a journey towards that goal; we are, perhaps, beginning to see the pointlessness of a political arrangement which, at different junctures, has spawned conflict and violence and which, in terms of creating the cornerstone of a cohesive nation has delivered nowhere near enough up to this time.
What is not debatable too is that generational evolution has brought a measure of change in the national attitude to politics. Neither of the country’s two major political parties – the PPP and the PNC – can any longer lay a realistic claim to the unswerving loyalty of the vast masses roughly divided along racial lines. That pit-of-the-stomach divisive loyalty that may once have held near complete sway was a function of a race-driven political equation that no longer holds the sway it once did, its loss of currency being attributable to the fact that at least an entire generation of Guyanese have seen the pointlessness of our rancid political culture.
What we loosely describe as the younger generation has, in a great many instances, completely decoupled their self-development from the politics of the day, opting for other preoccupations, not least, migration. Surely then, it is worth wondering whether – perhaps more than anything else – time itself has not been the greatest enemy of our old-style politics and political parties, which, as the creation of the coalition strongly suggests, are beginning to come to terms with the inevitability of change and of their own ‘mortality’ in their present forms.
Interestingly enough, it is former president Bharrat Jagdeo’s recent ‘treatise’ on the coalition, the basic thrust of which is that it is a PNC Trojan Horse for restoring itself to political office, that reflects the least understanding of the nature of the political transformation that is taking place. Surely, the arrival of a group of hitherto implacable political adversaries at an understanding that they can, after all, work together, ought to attract a much more studied response, one that goes beyond thoughts of subterfuge; and, surely, even if we cannot predict where the coalition will take us it has to be accepted that the political arrangements that have obtained for half a century and more – most particularly the turn-taking at political office between the PNC and the PPP – have offered us nothing that comes even close to a viable alternative for salvaging our country from the sorry political state in which it still finds itself.
Could it be so troubling to those of us who still favour clinging to the hopeless option of a political culture driven by no more than narrow self-interest are actually more concerned that the coalition might be the first signal that single-party rule in Guyana now stands imperilled?
The strongest argument that has been made for the APNU+AFC coalition has to do with the promise that it might hold as a political roadmap that can make a more than worthwhile contribution to charting a new political culture. Modest though it is in its infancy, it provides a promise of much more than that which has been delivered by the single-party governance options that have obtained for the almost half a century that we have been an independent nation. What the coalition offers is the hope of a new, inclusive political culture rather another divisive political ideology.
