Caught in a time-warp our two antediluvian parties revealed their true identities last Thursday. Despite any belief harboured by some of their supporters that they are modern entities, it is not so; in half a century they haven’t changed a single facet of their underlying political personalities. On February 13, the University of Guyana unions in collaboration with Move On Guyana Inc hosted a debate featuring candidates from parties contesting the 2020 polls. As it was none of the parties which were represented on that occasion will be contesting all ten administrative regions in the coming election. The two which will be, viz. APNU+AFC and the PPP/C, did not attend.
President of the University of Guyana Senior Staff Association, Dr Jewel Thomas, told the audience that all parties had been invited, and so any which were not participating did so out of choice. Conscious that a presidential candidate might not be available for the debate, the organisers had indicated they would accept another representative in their place. But the two largest parties did not send a representative either.
The audience was carefully selected and was by invitation only in order to secure a civilised, rational debate. There would have been no point in mounting such an exercise if any member of the public could have had access. Theoretically, if our two titans had condescended to take part in front of an open assembly, they would have made sure it was packed with their supporters who would have been calling out and heckling, thereby destroying all possibility of a meaningful exchange of views. For all of that, the restricted audience was probably not the main reason for their absence.
It is true that debates between party leaders are something of a novelty in this country, and even in the UK, the first one was not held until 2010. Furthermore, in the last general election there in 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson avoided appearing in any of them, as well as declining to be interviewed by any of television’s more unrelenting political interrogators. The general consensus was that given the fact he has a tendency to be gaffe-prone, his advisors did not want him under critical scrutiny in the run-up to the poll.
It may be that here too the two major leaders, one of whom will almost certainly be president, were unwilling to subject themselves to a probe of their views and criticism of their own records or those of their parties. Certainly, President David Granger has avoided press conferences like the plague during his almost five years in office while Mr Irfaan Ali would no doubt have been asked about matters he has hitherto tried to avoid, such as his academic credentials. However, they could always have sent representatives, but as noted, they didn’t do that either.
The leaders of the parties which were present at the debate were not impressed by the pusillanimity of the absentees who were not prepared to face questions from citizens and take the heat. Change Guyana’s Robert Badal was of the view that they “ran scared of new talent” and the measures which could be presented by the new parties. The Liberty and Justice Party’s Lenox Shuman regretted that the major players were not present as the newer parties did not have records and policies to defend.
ANUG’s Ralph Ramkarran thought that the fact the large parties had not appeared suggested they shared the view that the new parties were achieving “a great deal of traction.” Perhaps. But that does not take it far enough. What the two really want to do is reduce the poll to a two-horse race. The days when the PPP could rely on its ethnic majority to sweep it into office have gone; the Indian population like the African one is in decline. The PNCR came into government with the help of the AFC in 2015, but it has now effectively absorbed that party and is no doubt expecting it to supply the votes it brought to the Coalition the last time around. Whether that will turn out to be the case is doubtful, but it may be, nevertheless, that APNU feels the electoral support gap between it and the PPP/C is not as large as it used to be.
In a situation of changing demographics our oldest parties will need outside votes to secure an overall majority, and both seem to have concluded that these will come from the Indigenous people. Their population has been growing in recent times, and they are therefore a not insignificant proportion of the electorate. This is the reason why the two participated in a non-partisan Presidential Candidates Forum held by the Amerindian Peoples Association in collaboration with the National Toshaos’ Council on Wednesday, although they would not take part in the inter-party debate the previous Thursday. The Indigenous people are a constituency which needs to be wooed; third parties in contrast are bad news and threaten an overall majority. They are consequently not accorded any recognition as viable participants in the election process, and as far as possible are simply ignored. Neither the PPP/C nor APNU+AFC wants the voting population to see them as their equals and therefore as a legitimate alternative.
It is not that our political heavyweights need to discuss this approach and come to an agreement between themselves. They have no need to. They are both well-established players in the local political game and they understand the rules which they themselves have created. This is one of the few things, it might be added, on which they will be in unofficial accord. It would have been interesting if one of them had broken ranks and turned up to the presidential debate. Had that happened, the other one would probably have calculated that it would be better if it did so too.
In the days when politicians were a little less coy about their real motives Janet Jagan had the following to say to Bath supporters about third parties during her 1997 election campaign: “When the PPP did not obtain more than 50 per cent of the votes cast [in the 1964 election] but still secured the largest percentage by any single party of just over 46 per cent, the People’s National Congress and the United Force came together and formed a coalition government. This could happen again.” After listing Good and Green Guyana, the Working People’s Alliance and The United Force, as third parties which could come together, she went on to implore her constituents not to take the elections lightly, since they were “very serious.”
She did not explain that what had happened in 1964 could not happen in the same way in 1997, because the 1980 Constitution had intervened, but that did not alter the possibility that third parties hypothetically speaking could still have prevented the PPP/C from achieving an overall majority.
Stripped of their 1964 context, her underlying sentiments would nowadays be equally endorsed by the Coalition.