When most Guyanese agreed to participate in the recent elections, they were made to understand that it was ‘impossible’ for persons to vote for migrants who were out of the country on elections day and for those who have died. Whether or not this has taken place is not a matter for speculation, but can be and must be sufficiently verified factually. If a factual investigation finds that not only 1 or 10 or even 100 migrants and/or dead person ‘voted’ in the elections, but hundreds and over 1,000 did and that this did not happen in one or two regions but in every region of the country, what are we to conclude? For me, the problem is not merely numerical; it is structural and suggests that some corrupt actor has been systematically attempting to influence the outcome of the 2020 elections. If the ‘impossible’ can have become so pervasive, at the very least it also indicates that every other credible allegation must be thoroughly investigated and factored into the GECOM’s final decision.
I go further and ask, if proven true, what is the probability of such large scale (from the ‘impossible’ to a total of so far over a 1,000 occurrences spread across every region of the country) illegalities being unplanned/accidental and what agencies have the capacity to perpetrate and will benefit from such a massive conspiracy? Only the PPP and PNC have the capacity and are most likely to benefit from such a massive fraud, and what Guyana is confronted with is not an unintentional system breakdown. Long before the elections this column highlighted this possibility, pointed to the likely conspirators, their historic willingness to manipulate elections and the existence of a significantly bloated electoral register that they would likely use.
The only system that has now broken down – and good riddance to it – is the conspiratorial one that has undermined and devalued our votes in the quest to dominate the political space and prevent the political system from taking a more liberal path. Justice demands that given this opportunity GECOM must do all it can to destroy this conspiratorial network that it has been bequeathed by the very conspirators who have refused to create a more democratic framework or at the minimum a clean electoral list! It appears to me absurd to conceive of doing otherwise and propagandistic comments about what the law is will not suffice. What is lawful is for courts to determine and the objecting parties can go immediately to court and present their case.
The recent elections in Suriname have gone relatively well but there were some problems and many Guyanese are attempting to draw either positive or negative similarities. However, what is taking place there is qualitatively different from what is taking place here. There, given his legal problems, President Desi Bouterse might be trying to fortify his position in the government; it is not a struggle for power between two large solid ethnic blocks. Whereas here the winning ethnic party dominates the political space, a ‘loss’ in Suriname can be better equated to the unusual loss the PPP/C suffered in 2011, when it did not win over 50% of the votes and so did not control parliament. But given Suriname’s constitutional arrangements, even this comparison is an overstatement. Perennial coalition governments rule Suriname, a 2/3 parliamentary majority is required to win the presidency, there is a 15-member non-elective, military-influenced Council of State, which ensures that the government’s actions conform to the law and has constitutional powers to annul laws passed by the National Assembly (https://www.britannica.com/place/Suriname/Government-and-society), and a broad-based People’s Assembly can be convened to end the parliamentary deadlock on the appointment of the president.
For the most part, in dealing with these kinds of issues this column has adopted what I call a structural approach to political/ethnic dilemmas. Karl Marx said ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’ In other words, sometimes mankind cannot achieve what it wants to achieve because of the existing circumstance and will fail in its endeavours unless it adjusts to suit the existing conditions. Suriname provides a useful practical example of this interplay between structure and culture that is very suggestive of the kind of political solution that Guyana needs if it is to avoid the type of political turmoil that is now upon us.
I posit that if we now take the 750,000 Guyanese as they culturally are and place them in a similar ethnic configuration to that which exists in Suriname – East Indians 27.4%, African 21.7%, mixed 15.7%, Javanese 13.7%, mixed 13.4%, other 7.6% and unspecified 0.6% (CIA Factbook) – they will behave politically similarly to the Surinamese. However, if we take the 610,000 Surinamese as they are at present and place them in Guyana’s ethnic context – ‘East Indian 39.8%, African descent 29.3%, mixed 19.9%, Amerindian 10.5%, other 0.5% (includes Portuguese, Chinese, white (Ibid) – they will not behave similarly to Guyanese. While the Surinamese ethnic structure will have a determining impact on how Guyanese behave, the Guyanese structure will only have a conditional impact on Surinamese behaviour.
The way Guyanese politicians, indeed most of us, behave is reflective of a people schooled in the Westminster-type winner takes all political tradition. In the face of dwindling ethnic support, this majoritarian instinct is partly responsible for our politicians wanting to rig elections to take government and rule as they please. The British tradition is not one of sharing government: the 2010 Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition was the first full coalition in Britain since the 1945 war-time coalition government. However, it is obvious that regardless of how racist/ethnicist Guyanese are, the Surinamese structure of ethnicity above would curb the majoritarian mentality they have imbibed and force them to cooperate.
Placed in the present Guyanese context in which both of the large minority ethnic groups are struggling for government, Surinamese would most likely behave differently, for it had been a Dutch colony for 300 years and has been bequeathed a culture of political compromise. Indeed, while the winning party and who will form the next government in a Westminster system can many times be ascertained before the elections, the average number of days it takes the Dutch to form a government after an election is about 90, and it took 225 days in 2017. One senior Dutch politician claimed ‘Dutch elections suffer from a structural lack of results.’
‘He was referring to the phenomenon that major parties may win the elections but lose the subsequent game of government formation. …the parties with government potential, electoral gains can even be inversely related to the incidence of subsequent government participation. Only once, in 1977, did the ensuing government consist of parties that had all gained seats. … In the Netherlands, however, electoral gainers have often been excluded from the cabinet and losers included. … It would be too simple to say that the Social Democrats often ended up in opposition because they had won the elections, but the relationship between electoral results and the composition of the government clearly is an indirect one, in which bargaining relationships are the intermediate variable. As the ‘who’s in and who’s out’ question is usually not answered immediately after the elections, the emphasis is on the process of coalition building in the Netherlands’ (Muller, Wolfgang C and Kaar Strom (2003) Coalition Governments in Western Europe. Oxford University Press).
So when commenting, we must recognise that the electoral quarrel in Suriname is not between large ethnic groups, and losing government in Suriname is nothing as total as losing it in Guyana. Indeed, although it might at this stage be improbable, it is certainly not impossible for Bouterse to be reelected president and it might serve Guyanese well to contemplate the context in which the winner become a loser since neither side can take all!
