Small and insignificant as Guyana is and will continue to be for some time as the robber barons are left largely unmanaged to do as they please, its politics has been a fantastic tapestry of intrigue. For half a century, geopolitics intervened and hid the actual political expressions of a particularly pernicious type of racial/ethnic context, only to fall away and in contrition leave the local population and their elites as confused as ever as to the nature of their context and what constitutes a durable solution.
Two columns ago, I promised to combine some historical facts with a few personal reflections to make a blithe presentation about shared governance and provide support for my hypothesis that another significant shift (such as the one resulting from the fall of Soviet communism that made the PNC largely politically irrelevant to the West) has taken place in the global political system that threatens that party’s no prisoners approach to acquiring and holding on to political power. On that occasion I concluded that by refusing to establish shared governance the APNU+AFC coalition ‘has now dragged its supporters down to a very dark and slippery place’.
Here, given the direction my story is likely to take in the final part next week, I feel it necessary to clarify some personal and conceptual positions.
I have worked in the very heart of the PNC and was never encouraged to rig any elections or vote more than once. However, I was quite aware of these activities and on the whole supported them. For me, in the extant geopolitical context, the PPP was, at the very least, a Marxist/Leninist communist-orientated party and that kind of party and most of those the PPP was supporting worldwide were dictatorships, killing millions of people with the stated objective of destroying the very democracy the PPP was demanding for itself. As a result, the PPP’s commitment to democracy and majority rule, appeared opportunistic, being based upon the ethnic political majority it then controlled in Guyana.
Political virtues such a democracy, majority rule, transparency and inclusiveness are all means to a good and prosperous life but are not ends in themselves. They are not to be extended but resisted and will be resisted if sufficient power is available and the stated objectives of some group are the destruction of the very virtues upon which their initial existence depends. It is upon this type of contention that for some three decades Western interests colluded with the PNC to subvert majority rule – democracy in the parlance of the PPP – in Guyana.
My objections to the PPP and that of many other persons were rooted in the above perspective and had little to do with ethnicity. To be credible political forces, both the PPP and the PNC had to demonstrate, as they are now doing, that they had substantial support, and by its ethnic nature, given their elite composition, Guyana became ethnically divided between the PNC and PPP. But before the fall of communism and the PPP coming to government in 1992, ethnicity was to the elite, if not to the general population, a secondary matter. That is an important reason why, as I pointed out two weeks ago, many in the upper echelons of the PNC spent significant time arguing for national unity government. Personally, in retrospect that is why, after almost a decade of telling Jagan that he and his party were not good for Guyana, almost immediately upon the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to his surprise I could point out to him that his time had come!
Dr. Ptolemy Reid might have been quite neutral, but with good reason not everyone considered his operatives dabbling in issues having to do with national unity with the communist PPP was so undisturbed. One day in about 1978, going to a meeting at the Sophia Convention Centre, Attorney General Dr. Mohamed Shahabudeen, who was walking behind me and going to the same meeting, hailed me and after the usual pleasantries said in essence, ‘Why are you chaps filling the leader’s head with Marxism/Leninism and government of national unity … We are going to be overthrown!’ I believed that Shahab was exaggerating our, or more specifically my, influence, and in any case we had considered the matter and concluded that the PPP need not constitute a threat to Western interests if placed in a proper institutional national unity framework. In any case, what other choice did the West have? The PPP’s Soviet communism was clearly unacceptable and Forbes Burnham was saying everywhere that the WPA was the Worst Possible Alternative!
But these matters are never easy and Dr. Shahabudeen might well have been correct that the status quo – Burnham’s manipulation of a Westminster-type elections – was more certain than a flimsy institutional arrangement from which the PPP may be able to escape and use its ethnic majority to cause trouble. So the saga continued, and a couple of years after the discourse with Shahab, one evening when Ralph Ramkarran dropped me off at a residence I was staying at in Georgetown, waiting for me there was an embassy official who referred to Ralph as my ‘fellow (communist/socialist) traveler.’ Approaching the end of a quite substantial discourse, my interlocutor stated in no uncertain terms that although I may believe that baskets cannot sink, if the PNC continued on its current course, both Burnham and Jagan would be placed in the same basket and we would all see the result!
Burnham died and Desmond Hoyte came to the presidency in 1985, when ideological concerns were still primary, and he so disliked the Jagans, whom he claimed he spent his life keeping from government, that he dismantled another of Burnham’s efforts at forming a national unity government and presided over one of the largest rigged elections in Guyanese history. But guess what – coming to the end of his regime, the Berlin Wall fell, communism was no more and Hoyte, like many of us who did not understand the new context, gave himself the call-name Desmond Persaud to suggest that he was loved by the other side and proceeded to lose the 1992 general elections.
The ideological underpinning of the entire Burnham era was gone and the bicommunal nature of the Guyana, with race/ethnicity as its central pillar, kicked in in full force. Necessary though it perhaps was, for decades the ideological struggle over communism clouded the impossibility of managing a country such as Guyana in the normal liberal democratic majoritarian manner and without the cost in life, property and time of those who had made such an attempt. The democratic elections of 1992 were to result in heightened levels of national unity and development, but look where Guyana is today! It is said that one cannot keep doing the same thing in a similar context and expect substantially improved results. As the situation now is, the promise of the March 2020 national and regional elections is that when they are over another half a decade of political alienation, turmoil and suboptimal development will begin.
