Dear Editor,
The mess we find ourselves in following the no-confidence vote of 21 December, underlines that the bedevilling racial insecurity of which Eusi Kwayana (Sydney King), supported by Martin Carter, cautioned in early 1953 is just as virulent. Then he had counselled Jagan and Burnham that they should not seek to win the general elections, the first under universal adult suffrage; that they should win no more than 8 seats or one-third of those contestable, while utilising that cautiously modest electoral mandate, in opposition, to pursue a comprehensive political education in racial cohesion across the country. His extraordinary stance (not unusual in his long, arguably mercurial, career) was predicated on his firm belief that the PPP was a loose coalition of diverse races and equally varied political outlook – not ready to exercise power.
Kwayana contended that if the PPP did win (as he anticipated), it could precipitate the deep racial mistrust among Africans and Indians, discernible both in the party and in the wider society – encapsulated by the compelling political profile and massive ambition of Burnham and Jagan respectively. In fact, even before they formed the government after the ‘victory’ of April 1953 (‘crisis week’), the egos of these two leviathans had collided over the question of leadership and the composition of the cabinet. The constitution was suspended after 133 days, partly as a result of this raging incoherence as a governing party, compounded by their demonstrably irresponsible and immature attitude to governance. As early as February 1955, the fragile coalition had unravelled along racial lines. We have been reaping the whirlwind ever since.
In 1991, the year before the PPP was returned to power, after nearly 28 years in the wilderness, Cheddi Jagan told businessmen in Georgetown that the PPP rejected ‘winner-takes-all politics…and intends to form a plural democratic government to tackle the tasks of reconstruction’. No such initiative has been pursued because ‘winner-taking-all’ is most seductive. Indeed, the Burnham Constitution of 1980, which Jagan and others had railed against while in the wilderness, is too good a thing to give up by whoever ascends to the Presidency. Everybody has been hypocritical about this Constitution which fundamentally fails to recognise that Guyana is not yet a nation; and that general elections are really ethnic censuses that tend to exacerbate the deep-seated racial insecurities of its peoples.
Now is the time to address the issue of devising a totally new constitution that makes it mandatory for the two major political parties to seek a modus vivendi; that they must be bound to form coalition governments and therefore compelled to make it work, however impracticable this may appear and unpalatable it most likely will be. Guyana, on the threshold of abundant wealth that, rightly, will excite the expectations of all its peoples, has no peaceful and viable future without radical constitutional change of this nature. So the present debacle could be the catalyst for conceiving and constructing a civilised, and vastly more racially tolerant, society in the long-run.
I am suggesting, therefore, that this should be the principal item on the agenda when the President and the Leader of the Opposition meet on 19 January. A festering status quo is too ominous to contemplate. I believe what Sydney King, in his unique wisdom, advised 65 years ago has lost none of its relevance or its urgency.
Yours faithfully,
Clem Seecharan