Last Saturday, 21st March 2020, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) made a statement to the press that suggests that after seven decades at the helm of politics and government in Guyana, it has learnt very little. It said it ‘reject(s) the new narrative of ethnic inclusivity that has suddenly emerged, as a justification of the attempts by the APNU+AFC cabal, acting in concert with certain staff of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Secretariat, to rig the 2nd March 2020 elections. This recent fabrication, … will not succeed in distracting attention from the real issue at hand – derailing the democratic process, defeating the will of the electorate and the attempt to install an illegal Government in Office.’
What is taking place in Guyana is substantially neither new, electoral or sudden: it is a long and not unusual political conflict that has again erupted at the appropriate time and results from the fact that Guyanese are not as yet ‘a people’ or a ‘nation’ but essentially two large ethnic groups usually peacefully coexisting in the same geographical space. This was recognised since the early 1960s, when the PPP failed to grasp the most sensible solution suggested to it during the independence discourse and ended up in the political wilderness for 30 years. Many persons including this column have been talking about and, in the 2020 elections A New and United Guyana (ANUG) was largely formed and campaigned upon this understanding of Guyanese political reality. The PPP must also recognise by now that it does not matter if it ‘campaigned on a platform of offering inclusive governance, constitutional reform, specifically to construct a new governance model to capture this inclusive governance and on a Manifesto that provides plans and programmes for every single Guyanese.’ What is taking place in Guyana is to a substantial degree beyond a single party’s will to change.
It also cannot be changed by a majoritarian electoral system as that is the problem! It can only be changed at the negotiating table. Similar to the Indo-Guyanese, the Afro-Guyanese are a political party with their own specific leaders, and over decades have not allowed and will not allow the PPP to manufacture leaders for them. ‘There is little point in pleading for right-doing for with similar facts the opposite story can also be told. Nowhere has this story not played out and it is a mistake to blame the outcome on anyone. Power sharing becomes inevitable because of the logic of political cleavage in competitive democracies. (Orr, Scott. The Theory and Practice of Ethnic Politics: How What We Know about Ethnic Identity Can Make Democratic Theory Better. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2007).
Blinded by the majoritarian framework and the many denunciations of election monitors, the PPP is allowing others to take advantage of it, its constituency and Guyana. Elections observers were here to monitor the 2020 elections based upon the spirit, letter, and conventions of our laws, and one would have had to be totally blinkered not to realise that what occurred during the counting and tabulation process was unacceptable and had to be condemned by them. Democratic governments must promptly and condignly condemn this kind of bad electoral behaviour or elections observations world-wide had better close shop.
But rarely are faulty elections the only consideration when foreign governments sit down to make hard decisions that could harm a country and its citizens. Any government worth its salt must ask ‘the why question’ and their file on democratic relations in Guyana must be pretty hefty, for it has been one of a handful of countries that must be are on their democratic watch list. Manifesto commitments are rarely kept: remember what the coalition did, for example, and in any case, the commitments the PPP made above to inclusive governance, etc. have either been made before or are too broad and noncommittal. What the PPP/C needs to do is to commit itself to putting an end to the winner-takes-all political system, provide the country with some detail of what it has in mind and then find a path to the negotiation table.
Let me again rely upon the more learned in these matters. ‘If any generalization about institutional design is sustainable it is that majoritarian systems are ill-advised for countries with deep ethnic, regional, religious, or other emotional and polarizing divisions. Where cleavage groups are sharply defined and group identities (and intergroup insecurities and suspicions) deeply felt, the overriding imperative is to avoid broad and indefinite exclusion from power of any significant group’ (Future Notes SN: 26/2/2020).
As for the PNC, confronted with the facts that the government they support failed to make a serious effort to implement the constitutional reforms and establish the government of national unity it promised, their most significant retort is that the PPP was not in support of such reforms and that they require a 2/3 majority. This is an excuse, for so far as I am aware, the coalition did not ever try to find out from the PPP what it wanted and the PPP has not definitively refused an offer. Indeed, had it made an offer and had the PPP refused it notwithstanding its recent shenanigans, it would have garnered much broader and more national and international sympathy.
After all based strictly on the need to have a 2/3 majority in the National Assembly, the coalition that has just over 50% of support would have been prevented from making constitutional reforms to change the winner-takes-all system by a PPP that has just over 49% of the votes and believes that it could win future elections! What is the coalition to do? What is the place of the (2/3) law in this ethnic context? Is a substantial minority to allow itself to be perpetually ‘enslaved’ because of the law? I think not.
However, whatever foolishness the two parties continue to do, the sins of the parents must not be visited upon the children and so neither the misplaced self-interestedness of the PPP nor the duplicity of the PNC are sufficient for me to in any way help and restore the winner-take-all system. When the current crisis ends it ends but it will do so without my intervention unless the proposed changes are for the better. Indeed, let us all hope that the PPP rejects the kind of myopic reliance on majoritarian elections that left it 30 years in the political wilderness and that the PNC has now come to its senses about its actual electoral strength and the dangers of electoral manipulation! They both need to sit around the table and with the help of our international partners, who must be quite weary of our generations-long ethnic quarrel, build a more cohesive society out of one of the worlds’ most protracted problems. In other words, let us all unite to create, what is rarely possible in this kind of context; a win-win situation for all.
