No doubt with an eye on winning political support, during the 2005 flood, the PPP/C government deployed some of its political personnel to deliver food hampers etc., to affected people. If my memory is correct, in Dazzell Housing Scheme on the East Coast, using a boat to go from house to house, as I was approaching one residence, an African woman on the balcony shouted ‘It good for al you! It good fu the PPP’. Somewhat surprised, I asked‘ what is good for the PPP?’ ‘The flood, the flood!’ she exclaimed. As it turned, out she lived in the bottom flat that was flooded and was being accommodated in the upper flat by her neighbour. Yet notwithstanding her dire condition and that of thousands of others, she found some pleasure in the fact that the flood must have seriously discomfited the PPP government! Anyone who believes that in the presence of a competitive narrative being propagated by ethnic entrepreneurs they could teach the multitude of such people on both sides of the political divide to sensibly cooperate in making a nation of Guyana is delusional.
I remembered this because currently it is commonplace to hear ‘Guyana is blighted!’ Not only because of the quarrel over the elections or even the coronavirus: the former was somewhat predictable and the latter is akin to an act of god. But how can it possibly be that after decades of hoping and praying that Guyana is oil-rich, no sooner is the oil found and El Dorado appears in sight, events have conspired to bring a product that has sustained global development for over a century to its knees and crush the aspirations of a poor and struggling country? If you tend towards a belief in supernatural designs, there might be something here for you. For me, however, the current disillusionment would be significantly less if there was a united national management piloting us in these uncharted waters, and it is to this that I return.
In the last two columns I dealt with the underlying principles of my contention that Guyana requires consensual governance, and presented the basics of what such a regime will look like at the executive level. Briefly, I argued that in any country where there is a substantial ethnic minority, a winner-takes-all political arrangement will not work and political strife will reign until a more appropriate regime is established. The current electoral dispute substantiates this point and would best be used to achieve a watertight path to a more compatible governance system. I have read former Prime Minister Samuel Hinds (SN letter: 28/04/2020) and others speaking about the need for trust if such endeavours are to be successful, but I want to suggest that trust is best built within relationships and not outside of them. Indeed, if there was sufficient trust you might not need a new consensual regime! In any case, the world abounds with agreements, in Northern Ireland for example, that had to be negotiated amidst more deadly struggles than we have in Guyana.
I also suggested that to be comprehensive, about two dozen other associated reforms will have to be considered. Today I want to emphasise that our experience with constitutional reform suggests that if maximum results are to be achieved, before we embark upon any such process the major players need to develop an in-depth, common and clear understanding of the context of the reform process – what is to be reformed and why.
Firstly, one most important aspect of the reform’s context is that it will be driven by the political elites of the major political parties, and the conclusion of the German sociologist Robert Michels that the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ pervades all political parties, trade unions, co-operative societies and similar organisations still holds well. As he stated, ‘It is organisation which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators…..’ Some time ago, in ‘Anyone cognizant with the workings of oligarchies should not be surprised Corbin has been returned as leader’ (SN: 24/08/09), I argued that ‘Oligarchies have been a long-standing difficulty in all societies, the problem they pose in societies such as Guyana is not the fact of their existence, but the permissive context in which they operate. As such, the policy conclusion would not emphasise the removal of oligarchy but to reform its permissive context.’
Therefore, when the citizens call upon leaders to make laws or ‘agree’ upon some issue, the consensual democratic outlook must recognise that in the mind of Guyana’s political elite the national interest is likely to take third place to their oligarchic and ethnic interests. This will, where appropriate, require rules insisting upon stringent time limits, ethnic participation and consensus, constitutional loss of authority, etc. For example, where, as in the case of the appointment of the Chancellor of the Judiciary, the law requires that the president and the leader of the opposition ‘agree’ on the appointment, the rule can be so written that they both loose that authority if the matter is not dealt with in a timely manner.
For example the rule could state: ‘Upon a permanent vacancy of the office of the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice, the vacancies will be advertised by the Judicial Service Commission and based upon predetermined – academic, professional, ethnic – qualifications 2 suitable candidates for each position will be short-listed and presented to the president within three months. The president will consult and agreement will be made with the leader of the opposition within 1 month and the appointment will be made within 14 days thereafter. If no agreement is reached within that period the matter will be determined by sortition: random selection from the short listed applicants. Juries that can send one to the gallows are chosen in many jurisdictions by sortition.
Secondly, before any reform process is agreed upon, what is to be reformed and why needs to be clearly understood and agreed upon by the political elites of the major parties. During the 1999/2001 constitutional process, the parties went about their reform business haggling and making changes that at best were intended to increase public and stakeholder participation – at times, as we have just noted, in a quite radical manner by requiring that the parties ‘agree’ with each other – within the existing power relations, but this approach meant that an important element was missed, and as a result by the end of his term in office in 2011, experience with the presidency of Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo had led many both inside and outside the PPP/C to believe that there is something terribly wrong with the manner in which the office of the president is constitutionally constructed. Riding on this bandwagon, in its ‘Action Plan for Guyana’ (2011), the AFC (Alliance for Change) argued that our ‘economic success is being stymied by a politically backwards constitution’ and that upon coming to office it intended to establish a constitutional process and ‘will recommend amendments for the removal of the executive Presidency’.
The problem is that growing out of a British tradition, there is no clear structural separation of powers in our system of government and the implications of this for an ethnically divided society were totally missed in the 2001 reforms. In my first article in this column ‘A potentially toxic brew of presidential and parliamentary systems’ (SN: 01/06/2011), I said that, ‘The actual or assumed separation of powers and executive and legislative responsibility and accountability to the people are the central features of democratic constitutional arrangements. What precise form these arrangements take depends on their contexts. … our system is best characterized as a semi-presidential one, but it is a pretty minimalist one. In seeking to mix the parliamentary and presidential systems, we have coupled a most questionable element of the parliamentary system (the informal executive control of the parliament) to what one writer called the “unipersonal executive responsibility” of presidentialism and thus created a potentially toxic brew!’
In Guyana, the government effectively controls the parliament and if this is unacceptable in normal situations, the current relationship between the executive and the legislature is deadly in our situation where the former is usually in the hands of the oligarchic elites of one ethnic group. Unless serious political changes are immediately made, this toxic political context is what we will have to live with whichever party ‘wins’ the present elections. Therefore, the process of constitutional reform requires at the very least that the political elite firstly properly understand and find broad agreement on the social context of the reforms and their requirements.
