Today the Caribbean Court of Justice will inform us whether or not it has jurisdiction to hear the appeal by Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo and presidential candidate Dr. Irfaan Ali against the decision of the Guyana Court of Appeal that it has jurisdiction to hear the matter brought to it by Ms. Eslyn David. Given the plain meaning of the text under consideration (Article 177 of the Constitution) and the context in which it was first written, the Court will have a hard time justifying its jurisdiction. However, the wide ranging demands placed on record by counsel for the appellants mean that we are likely to be presented with some erudite judicial comments. Of course, broad moral exhortations will not do: such comments will have to be properly located in the extant political context of Guyana if they are to be of much consequence.
A central feature of the current dispute is the claim by the Coalition government that the opposition has massively manipulated the March 2020 general and regional elections. In around mid 2019, to help prevent elections manipulation that I believe is indeed substantial and is stultifying Guyana political growth, I wrote a few columns. In ‘How to stop elections rigging’ (SN:31/07/2019) I argued that given the lengths some politicians are prepared to go to rig elections, defending democratic elections will be difficult.
Guyana is essentially a bicommunal society in which the two large ethnic groups control over 80% of the voting population but it is progressing toward becoming a more politically collaborative multi-ethnic polity in which small movements of votes can lead to a change of government. Some believe that herein lay the answer to Guyana’s political turmoil. For example, last Sunday (SN: Letters, 05/07/2020), Mr. Mike Persaud took a similar kind of position. In a nutshell he claimed that, ‘The justification for shared governance (SG) no longer exists.’ For the basis for the advocacy of SG ‘had been a perception that the PPP … would win every election.’ However, demographic changes mean that with sensible mobilisation there will now be periodic regime turnover. Nevertheless, ‘Perception of the PPP and PNC as ethnic parties remains and … These parties must of necessity transform themselves into genuine multi-racial parties, if they want to help Guyana evolve into a State of genuine multi-racial democracy.’
I agree with Mr. Persaud that politically Guyana is moving in a more progressive direction and this is one reason elections manipulation by the two large parties to win over 50% of the votes is extremely reactionary. For this reason the information of electoral manipulation that has surfaced since the 2020 elections quarrel between the PPP/C and Coalition government must not be simply dismissed for it demonstrates that elections rigging is substantial and well entrenched. And, it is driving the society away from its natural progressive course and should be dealt with immediately.
However, Mr. Persaud is incorrect to believe that the issue is simply one of regime change. In countries such as Guyana it is about the existence, maintenance and mobilisation of ethnic alienation and unless regime change includes the major ethnic groups is not sufficiently helpful. For example, how helpful is the kind of change brought about by the Coalition where a small party comes together with a larger African ethnic partner to keep the substantial Indian ethnic group and their representatives out of office? Matters not how equitable is the Coalition behaviour the PPP/C’s narrative would undermine its authority and obstruct Guyana’s development agenda. This occurred during the previous PPP/C government and became worse the longer that party stayed in government. Our political parties want to stay forever in office even if they have to manipulate elections to do so and the PPP has already promised us forty years of rule. It was the effort of the PPP/C to stay alone in government and overcome the opposition it confronted that led to the loss of hundreds of lives, economic decline and the association with funny money to retrieve that decline and the general increase in its dictatorial behaviour that this effort required. Why is this generally so?
‘This results from the nature of competitive politics where … leaders sell stories for votes … In such a competitive environment, politicians of all kinds are opportunistic. … Where a racial group is small, the stories of its leaders tell to gain support, though racially biased must be politically sensible. Yet, if sufficiently agitated and of significant numbers the traditional parties will have to accommodate it in the ruling circles. However, as the group become large enough, the story its leaders tell become more radical. The group becomes a political party which can no long be accommodated within existing parties but only side by side with them. To the extent that the constitutional arrangements ignore this development, tension, alienation, disturbances and underdevelopment results. There is little point in blaming the community leaders for, … their stories are fit and do win them maximum support. There is little point in pleading right-doing for with similar facts the opposite story can also be told. … Nowhere has this story not played out. (It is a) mistake to blame the outcome on anyone. Power sharing become 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).
Blaming the dynamic of the system on anyone is an error and that is why scholars such as Professor Arendt Lijphart, a foremost consociational/shared governance expert stated that: ‘Over the past half-century, democratic constitutional design has undergone a sea change. … In deeply divided societies the interests and demands of communal groups can be accommodated only by the establishment of power sharing’ (file:///C:/Users/Owner/OneDrive/SG/ lijphart%20 Constitutional_ Design.pdf). Professor Sammy Smooha of University of Haifa, Israel, claimed that there is ‘in the West, two main forms of democracy for managing conflicts in ethnically or nationally divided societies. The classical and predominant form is liberal democracy… [and] … the other form is consociational democracy (shared governance). According to Smooha the alternatives are either the establishment of an ethnic democracy that curtails some of the right of the ethnic minority or and ethnic non-democracy, i.e., an ethnic dictatorship. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication /227539811_ The_Model_of_Ethnic_Democracy Israel_as_ a_Jewish_and_Democratic_State).
These broad positions need to be nuanced to the local context but those who have spent considerable time studying these matters and my own experience of how over the last 60 years ethnic conflict has played out in Guyana suggest that when Guyanese politicians say they are not supportive of shared governance, they are at best advocating some form of an ethnic dictatorship! To Mr. Persaud’s recommendation that the PPP/C and the PNC should transform themselves into multi ethnic political parties; this is precisely what they have been attempting to do without success for six decades. Many of us have yet come to grips with the logic of political competition in deeply divided multi-ethnic societies!
