Today marks the 50th anniversary of Guyana becoming a republic. The vast majority of Guyanese were born after that time, and anyone who was an adult on that very first Republic Day would now be included among the oldest segment of the population. While everyone will have heard of Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan, this country’s very first president does not enjoy the same level of name recognition. The reason is that Arthur Chung was not an executive president; he fulfilled a formal constitutional role as head of state, having replaced the Queen as represented by the Governor-General in that office.
Nevertheless, he did hold some limited powers, more particularly in relation to the removal of the prime minister as well as cabinet ministers, in addition to which he was also technically the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Where constitutional functions pertaining to that particular position were concerned, however, he followed the instructions of then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. An essentially apolitical figure, he took no political decisions during his ten years as president, restricting himself for the most part to ceremonial duties and diplomatic encounters both here and abroad as part of this country’s foreign policy outreach. For those members of the public who still have a direct memory of him, they probably recall him better as a high court judge who presided over some high-profile trials than as a head of state.
The decision for Guyana to become a republic was not a contentious one; the PPP as much as the PNC was in support of it, both for nationalistic reasons as well as because it did not sit comfortably with a Marxist party to accord royalty a role in the nation’s political arrangements. Speaking at the recommissioning of Ramphal House last Thursday, Sir Shridath Ramphal was quoted as saying, “The Republic of Guyana, although it came later than Independence, was in our national genes from independence; from birth.”
If there was no conflict on the matter of Guyana’s constitutional status, there was nonetheless no agreement on who should fill the post of president. Arthur Chung was the PNC’s candidate, but the PPP favoured an altogether more political figure, Ashton Chase, who had been associated with the party more-or-less from its inception. Burnham then used the PNC’s fraudulently gained majority in Parliament to secure Chung’s election, and repeated the exercise in 1976 when he was re-elected.
From the citizens’ point of view, one of the president’s great virtues was his unprepossessing quality; he assumed no airs and graces, and could never be accused of pretentiousness. He consorted easily with every stratum in the society. Burnham clearly chose him at least partly because of his Chinese ancestry, thereby avoiding the problem of selecting an Indian or an African, with all the inevitable connotations such an appointment would have involved.
Despite the fact that in principle the PPP had no objection to Guyana becoming a republic, that party did object to Burnham’s substitution of Republic Day for the Independence Day holiday. That became especially evident after the PPP/C assumed office in 1992. They re-introduced the Independence holiday, and attempted to scale down the Republic one, with a view, it was thought, to eventually eliminating it altogether. The public, however, was not of a mind to indulge them where that was concerned, and so Republic has stayed, and so, it might be added, has Independence. It is, one supposes, a kind of accommodation.
There may have been several reasons why the PPP did not like the celebration of Republic. In the first place, it was not as important in the political life of the nation as was Independence, which gave us the 1966 Constitution. The formation of the Republic in 1970 despite the ‘Schedule’ which made us a republic, did not fundamentally change the Constitution’s main provisions. In other words, if the party thought that the ten years between 1970 and 1980 were only a political interlude, they would not have been entirely incorrect. The great transformations in Guyana’s political firmament came in 1966 and 1980, not 1970.
In the second place, Republic was particularly associated with Burnham, whereas the story of Independence was infinitely more complicated. It is true, of course, that Jagan and his team refused to take part in the final conference in London which agreed the 1966 Constitution, but in the end, he and some of the key figures in his party decided they would attend the Independence observances in the National Park. In a symbolic gesture, the nation’s two foremost political leaders − Burnham and Jagan − famously hugged each other after the Guyana flag was raised for the first time at midnight on May 26.
In the third place, the PPP/C probably came under pressure from a segment of its more purist supporters who disapproved of the indecorousness of the street displays. In the end, however, as noted above, the party had to embrace 23rd February, granting money for certain government floats and having some of their ministers join the tramp.
On Thursday, Sir Shridath Ramphal presented a copy of the first Constitution of Guyana reflecting its republican status to Minister of Foreign Affairs Karen Cummings, and noted the role he had played in the drafting of the ‘Schedule’. He was, of course, Attorney General at the time, and had also been responsible for the drafting of the unfortunately much-maligned original 1966 Constitution.
In his address, he appealed for national unity in the context of the ICJ’s hearings on the Venezuela border controversy set for next month. “The closing days of a national election and the days after it when it pronounces its democratic decision, those days are fractious ones in any democracy, and Guyana is not immune from this,” he told his audience. “But we do have a greater need than usual to demonstrate to the world that our national motto; One People, One Nation, One Destiny, describes us and does proclaim how elemental that oneness is to our One Destiny.”
The appeal for unity had its echo 50 years earlier, albeit within a somewhat different frame of reference. “Our survival as a nation will depend on how well we work together,” said our first constitutional president, going on to remark in so many words that citizens should bring a halt to the friction between them in order to get on with development. Whether we have learnt any lessons about unity at this point in our history than we did in the intervening half century remains to be seen.