In 2008 95% of African Americans voted for Barack Obama to become president of the United States of America and most Guyanese saw nothing wrong with that, so why are we making so much fuss when 95% of Africans and Indians vote for the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP/C) respectively? The answer is simple: it is because we are confusing who these significant groups of people wish to be ruled by with a Western colonial method of how they should be ruled! We are being procrustean: trying to fit the concrete political expression of the various groups into an arbitrary political construct left us by our colonial masters!
There was a time when assimilation – ‘The process of … taking on the traits of the dominant culture to such a degree that the assimilating group becomes socially indistinguishable from other members of the society’- was the prevalent colonial approach for building cohesive democratic societies and this led to tremendous cruelty and hardship. ‘The forced assimilation of indigenous peoples was common in the European colonial empires of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. In North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Asia, colonial policies toward indigenous peoples frequently compelled their religious conversion, the removal of children from their families, the division of community property into salable, individually owned parcels of land, the undermining of local economies and gender roles by shifting responsibility for farming or other forms of production from women to men, and the elimination of access to indigenous foodstuffs’ (https://www.britannica.com/topic/assimilation-society).
Over many decades people rebelled, this approach has been generally abandoned and today we live in the era of multiculturalism whose ‘proponents … reject the ideal of the “melting pot” in which members of minority groups are expected to assimilate into the dominant culture in favor of an ideal in which members of minority groups can maintain their distinctive collective identities and practices.’ Multiculturalism is now said to provide fairer terms of integration that are compatible with, not opposed to, the integration of other cultures into society. (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiculturalism/). Needless to say, this approach also has its detractors, particularly those who now argue that it has gone too far.
Just as there is absolutely nothing wrong with people living together and celebrating their own religious/racial/ethnic cultural legacy, so too there is nothing wrong with people living peacefully in a common geographical space but wanting to be ruled by those of their own race/ethnicity/religion. Indeed, as we speak, globalization has made the former more or less homogeneous societies of Europe more heterogeneous and the political models they have historically lived within are coming under severe strain. As a result, many of the usual complaints of the former colonial peoples are today emanating from the deprived populations in these countries. The system has led to enormous inequalities, all the power is with the elites who are milking the poor, we must become independent from exploitative foreign rulers, a revolution is needed to take back our country!
Such global issues aside, there is a broad consensus that Guyana’s deeply divided ethno/political condition has largely been responsible for its current level of poverty and if not immediately addressed will continue to be an important obstacle to its future development. Yet, as the 2020 elections draw closer there is a near absence of thought and discourse, much less action, on this seminal issue. There exists the normal forlorn hope of wrestling government from the two parties and thus signaling an end to ethnic politics or winning a sufficient number of seats in the National Assembly to hold the government accountable. History is certainly not with those who believe the former and even if the latter is accomplished; as we have today, it is likely to lead to the exclusion of a large ethnic sector and thus not contribute significantly to ending ethnic alienation and opposition.
The focus of most of the parties are on the usual bread and butter issues, but even here nothing substantially new is on the table and this is not surprising because the problem in Guyana is not a dearth of developmental ideas but the nature of governance. Anyone who consults our political history, the National Development Strategy, the Green State Development Strategy and the various 2015 political manifestoes of the larger parties will find it difficult to devise new approaches. The result is that the emphasis is upon who will hold office, with their claims that they are more honest, intelligent, competent, patriotic, etc., than Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Desmond Hoyte, Sam Hinds, Janet Jagan, Bharrat Jagdeo, David Granger and a host of others who have failed to transform Guyana’s abundant human and natural resources into a good life for all its people.
You might buy these individual and group claims of superiority but I do not. I believe that the efforts of the abovementioned persons foundered largely as a result of the destructive political framework they were attempting to manage. There is a mismatch between how our peoples want to be governed and how the political elite, many of whom are simply unaware that they are locked in the Western colonial vision of managing politics, is attempting to govern them. Until this is fixed all other efforts will fail or produce suboptimal results.
Just as we had over decades to experience the deprivations of assimilation before walking away from it, we have suffered and are still suffering from the suboptimal management usually associated with trying to force the behaviour of peoples into inappropriate social constructs. We have to extricate ourselves from one of the fundamental Western liberal assumptions that a stable democracy needs to be based on a system of individual rather than group rights,’ (Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds (20xx) Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies) if we are to walk away from our current governance predicament.
However, if we are to live together in this geographic space group right must be tempered by some formulation of a national interest. Perhaps through no fault of their own, the older parties are already locked into the present archaic, colonial, opportunistic framework. Therefore, Guyana’s liberation rests in the collaboration of the smaller parties to establish a governance arrangement more in keeping with the repeatedly expressed desire of our various peoples.
