It would have been naïve, to say the least, to expect that with the very best of intentions the APNU+AFC administration would not have – sooner or later – begun to encounter its very own political banana skins and that those would not have given rise to the need for the coalition to confront those attendant challenges. New political administrations with no preceding ‘baggage’ to bother about, have the liberty of basking in the glow of their campaign promises and ‘soaking up’ what one might call a honeymoon period, that is to say, an interlude during which some measure of allowance is made for slippage attributable to newness. During that period too, undertakings given in a haze of celebratory post-elections euphoria and having to do with promises of positive transformation tend to be taken by uncritical audiences, unconditionally, at face value, though that is not to say that those undertakings are necessarily lacking in sincerity.
When the Cheddi Jagan administration entered office in 1992 it choose as its rallying cry the sobriquet lean and clean, as a slogan for defining both the character of its leaders and the moral focus of its administration. For a while at least the undertakings embodied in that slogan were taken at face value, at least by those who supported the PPP/C’s election to office. In the end, however, the whole thing fell flat on its face.
Analysts of the twenty-three years of the PPP/C’s tenure in office tend to differ on the point of exactly what juncture in the life of administration the wheels might have fallen off of its professed altruism. Mostly, however, there is the view that the administration began to lose its way after its first President, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, who, up to that time, was the Party’s unquestioned moral rudder, passed away. There is the view that the death of Dr. Jagan marked the beginning of the creation of a political slippery slope from which neither the PPP nor the PPP/C administration were able to recover; so that by the time the PPP/C administration departed office just under a year ago, its professed good intentions had become thoroughly discredited, enveloped in a quagmire of image-defacing accusations, against which it found considerable difficulty in defending itself. One might add that while the agenda of the APNU+AFC coalition in the run-up to last year’s poll was based on campaign promises of its own, it was also rooted, in large measure, in what it felt to be the wrongdoings of the PPP/C administration that had already been firmly rooted in the consciousness of a sizeable portion of the electorate.
There can now be no question that the coalition’s so-called honeymoon period has now well and truly come and gone. In this post-honeymoon period there will be no shortage of critics, some of whom have already declared that the excesses of its predecessor require that its own feet be held firmly to the fire. The danger in what one might call a fixation with ‘accountability’ is that, its virtues notwithstanding, such a preoccupation might easily lead to excursions into the wildest of exaggeration that allow for political delinquency to be seen under every rock. The administration may have seen TIGI’s criticisms in this light thus the quick defence from President Granger against the “corruption” aspersions.
After that, just two days ago, the Alliance for Change weighed in with its own critical take on the controversy that surrounds Minister Harmon, on the recent audits that have been the subject of much media coverage and public attention and the question of the release of the report into the Walter Rodney Commission of Enquiry. It was a decidedly politically awkward development since one is left to wonder whether, given the fact of the coalition, there ought not to exist some alternative, less awkward mechanism than a public pronouncement by one side or the other, for letting their feelings on sensitive issues be known and agreeing on means by which differences are resolved. It is something that they certainly need to think about since it is not difficult to see how the absence of such a mechanism might interfere with their extant political arrangement.
Taken together, these developments would appear to represent the first really serious threat to the public image of the coalition administration and it is really up to the government, and perhaps, particularly, up to President Granger himself, to ensure that it is held in check by sending the sorts of signals that point unambiguously to his administration’s intention to be accountable.
There is the argument out there that the now not so new administration has begun to accumulate a fair amount of ‘baggage’ of its own and, frankly, that view is hardly surprising given what would have been some measure of post-elections self-inflicted slippage coupled with what, from the beginning of its tenure in office, has been an adversarial political opposition. Going forward, it really is a matter of just how the administration responds to what now lies before it, in terms of both the challenges it now faces as a government and what would appear to be, at least, an awkward interlude for the coalition. The key element in the journey beyond this hurdle will be President Granger’s leadership.
