In last week’s Future Notes I quoted President David Granger as saying, ‘Now my brothers and sisters, we are in government again. Eight years ago, we founded APNU and four years ago, we went into an alliance to form a coalition with the AFC. This is the first time in the history of Guyana that a six-party coalition has formed the government. We formed it because that is what the people wanted. They don’t want to see winner takes all. They don’t want to see one-party government. They got what they asked for. Look at our record… We deserve another five years to conduct, to carry on the work we have started…give us a chance’.
In response to this I stressed that ‘Winner does not take all does not mean simply handing out a few offices to some electorally ineffective parties. It means that no ethnic groups and their leaders should be in a position to take all, and there is little doubt that the PNCR is in such a position in the current coalition. President Granger and his government have not fulfilled their manifesto promise to institutionalise a broad-based government of national unity, and have thus failed on this critical front. The result is that today Guyana is as, if not more, polarized than it has ever been and faking the existence of a situation in which the PNCR is not taking all will fool no one.’
Dr. David Hinds in a letter to SN on Monday `The Coalition has allowed for a re-emergence of political plurality among African Guyanese‘ stated that I took two positions in my article. He agreed with my contention that the coalition does not represent Granger and the APNU+AFC’s promised government of national unity, but took issue with my suggestion that the coalition of parties is really a mask for African Guyanese ethnic vote for the PNC. (Please note that I stated that the smaller parties were electorally ineffectual without any reference to the ethnic origins of their individual contributions.)
Dr. Hinds agrees with my view that African and Indian Guyanese electoral behaviour is driven by ethnicity, but thinks that sufficient attention is not paid to the nuances that accompany the ethnic vote. ‘The emergence of the Coalition has allowed for an accompanying re-emergence of political plurality among African Guyanese whereby they vote ethnically but arrive at the ballot box from more than one perspective.’ From his standpoint, analysts, including myself, have been unable to grasp these nuances because of their reliance on a dominant ethnic paradigm that automatically allocates African and Indian votes to the PNC and PPP respectively. But this paradigm he claims leaves no space for third parties, and the WPA has fallen victim to the logic of it.
As a result, the WPA has to blow its own horn because the logic of the paradigm results in it being largely locked out of the media. ‘That they could think that my constant media presence as an opinion shaper, for example, does not translate into some political capital for the WPA points to the over reliance on the dominant paradigm.’ I beg to differ. Speaking strictly to the frequency of media presence, CN Sharma was arguably one of the most popular politicians; always on the media trying to help people, many of whom promised to vote for him, yet his Justice for all Party never got even 1% of the votes at a national election.
Similarly, the WPA has never been an electoral force of any consequence. In the 1992 democratic opening, when the party was at the height of its popularity, it entered the electoral fray and received just 2% of the votes and 1 seat compared to the PPP/C and PNC’s 53.5 % and 42.3% respectively. And in 2001, the WPA/ Guyana Action Party coalition got 2.4% of the votes and 2 seats compared with the PPP/C and PNC’s 53% and 41.3%. Nothing the WPA has done since has given me any reason to change my assessment of it as being extremely electorally weak, and Dr. Hinds never tires of telling us that it is perhaps because of this electoral weakness that its coalition partner treats it as something of a rag doll. This is the reason the WPA is not taken seriously.
Although Dr. Hinds is claiming to have substantial support among PNCR supporters, he is astute enough to recognise that if the WPA leaves the coalition – the bosom of the PNCR – it, like the others, would be dead in the water. ‘It is clear to the WPA that its resonance within the African Guyanese constituency is contingent upon the party remaining in the Coalition.’ He claims that one of his ‘most applauded lines at the meetings urges constituents who are dissatisfied with the PNC and AFC to vote WPA.’ What this actually translates to is precisely what most of them would have done in any case: vote PNCR.
Electoral effectiveness aside, the WPA has over the years successfully projected itself as some kind of protector of the national political high-ground. But Dr. Hinds’ explanation of the role the party is at present playing in the coalition makes it impossible for it to even pretend such nobility. By its own admission, the WPA has reduced itself to being an apologist for the PNCR to African Guyanese. This position is not a requirement of coalition politics, is pregnant with difficulties and has taken the WPA into another zone.
(1) It places the party firmly in the African community where its supporters apparently are; (2) The African Guyanese constituency is committed to voting ethnically, so the WPA must and has agreed to encourage them to do so. ‘We do so cognizant that there is a critical mass of people who look to us for political guidance and leadership and that we have the capacity to sway disgruntled voters who may otherwise choose to stay home’; (3) He tells us that within the coalition process ‘we are putting WPA’s traditional values (and) its political culture.’ One must ask where is the WPA’s self-proclaimed multi-ethnic stance in all of this, and (4) What did he and the president mean when they said ‘that’s what the people want’? Are they dangerously putting a higher value upon what African people want? This is somewhat doable in an ethnic democracy where the democratic rights of other groups are subjugated to those who hold government, but the PPP/C tried that and failed.
Furthermore, the notion that there exists some dominant ethnic paradigm that prevents one from drilling down into intra-party behaviour is a fiction. No one is unfamiliar with the internal dynamics of political parties or coalitions it is just that one is not interested in the personalities or groups within the parties that are best at persuading voters not to stay at home! What is important for the political system as a whole is how the electorate ultimately divides and how to deal with this unfortunate situation in a sensible way. There has always been and will be factions within political parties, particularly coalitions, and people usually go to the polls and vote for the same party from different perspectives and for different reasons. Given the extremely poor performance of the APNU+AFC government, the WPA has taken on an important role and is proving quite adept at cajoling disillusioned supporters into giving ‘us’ another chance. I suspect that if the WPA did not exist, the machinators in the PNCR would have invented it.
