(This is my presentation to the National Conversation on Ethnic Relations 14th & 15th December, 2020)
Chairperson, members of the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC), ladies and gentlemen. I thank the ERC for inviting me to make this presentation on the challenges it faces and the way forward, for I am one of those who strongly supported it as an institution that could help to significantly bridge Guyana’s ethnic/racial divide. However, in the two decades of its existence, the efforts by the ERC and others have not had a notable positive impact on ethnic relations and a case can be made that the situation has become worse.
So how and why did we arrive at this point? What are the challenges the ERC must overcome and how should it proceed? I will argue that the ERC is caught in a context of permanent ethnic political affirmation about which it could do nothing and so its performance will continue to be extremely suboptimal. The history of Guyana can provide a snapshot of this relationship and the pathway open to the ERC.
In 1951, the Report of the British Guiana Constitutional Commission, better known as the Waddington Report, stated that ‘race is a patent difference and is a powerful slogan ready to the hand of unscrupulous men who can use it as a steppingstone to political power.’ Three years later, another British Guiana Constitutional Commission, in the Robertson Report of 1954 was far more pessimistic about Guyana’s future: ‘We do not altogether share the confidence of the Waddington Commission that a comprehensive loyalty to British Guiana can be stimulated among peoples of such diverse origins.’ Together with unscrupulous politicians we now are told that given the ethnic structure of Guyana it was unlikely to ever become a nation.
It appears that the position taken by John Stuart Mill, the eminent British philosopher (of nationality as connected with Representative Government) speaking, one hundred years before in 1861 about democratic government and countries like Guyana, was finally registering. ‘Free institutions,’ he claimed, ‘are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow feeling (the essence of nationhood) … the united public opinion necessary to the working of a representative government cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another.’
There is a tendency for mankind to believe that regardless of the circumstances it is possible through conversations to make changes. However, Mill’s kind of social structuralism implies that human beings are not completely free and autonomous in their choices and actions but are instead constrained by the social world they inhabit and the social relations they form with one another. This suggests that the ethnic problem in Guyana was not directly caused either by wicked men, the ethnic configuration of the country or a combination of these but essentially by the nature of these variables and political framework in which they are located. From Mill’s standpoint, Guyana and countries like it were doomed to political instability and poverty and given what has taken place over the last two generations it would not be unreasonable to conclude that he was correct!
Believe it or not, this belief that ethnically divided countries are essentially dysfunctional was the conventional wisdom up to the late 1950s, when scholars began to look at them to consider how they could become more stable and democratic. Sir Arthur Lewis, Nobel Laureate and Caribbean man, is considered the father of consensual type governance arrangements for his 1965 consideration of politics in West Africa that theoretically opened up new democratic possibilities for countries with deep ethnic divisions.
Two types of democracy can be now considered ideal types. The first is based on equal citizenship and majority rule and tries to homogenize and assimilate the population. The second uses various mechanisms such as power-sharing – minority inclusion in the national power structure – proportionality – distribution of resources according to the size of the group – veto power – to avoid decision that adversely affect vital interests of the minority, and politics of negotiation, compromise, consensus and indecision instead of majority rule.
In 2007, Scott Orr briefly summarizing the logic of this process and the dilemma it poses for countries such as Guyana and institutions like the Ethnic Relations Commission (The Theory and Practice of Ethnic Politics: How What We Know about Ethnic Identity Can Make Democratic Theory Better) concluded that once the group is of a reasonable size: ‘To the extent that the constitutional arrangements ignore this development tension, alienation, disturbances, and underdevelopment result. There is little point in blaming the community leaders as in the competitive political environment, their stories 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 played out differently. It is a mistake to blame the outcome on anyone. Power sharing becomes inevitable because of the logic of political cleavage in competitive democracies.’
Prominent examples of countries with this kind of problem, nationally or regionally, were Belgium, Canada in relation to Quebec, Cyprus, Czechos1ovakia, Fiji, Guyana, Malaysia, Israel, Sri Lanka in relation to the Tamils, and Northern Ireland. Of all these countries only the ones that have adopted forms of power-sharing, Belgium, Canada, Malaysia and belatedly Northern Ireland, have avoided political chaos of some form. Guyana is where it is because it has been one of those countries whose leaders have not taken advantage of what is required to bring democratic governance to its category of countries.
In a conducive consensual political environment, in collaboration with stakeholders, organisations like the ERC could have worked to understand the attitudes and experiences of the ethnicities in the home, school, labour market, justice and health systems, etc. and suggest changes that make people feel that ethnic equality really exists. It could have conducted ethnic disparity audits and developed and suggested the implementation of measures to close the ethnic disparity gap. But if, as the theory suggests and our own experience over the last six decades have demonstrated, pleading with the politicians who control 80% of the population to do the right thing is a waste of time, what is the point of the ERC?
The main problem is that the influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in Berbice and in Linden where different sets of leaders have the confidence of those of their ethnicity and on an hourly basis must inevitably affirm themselves by spewing political ethnic bias. The ERC has made no impact because it cannot do so unless the persistent ethnic political tug of war is quelled, and this cannot be achieved without forms of consensual political accommodation. The alternatives are consensual democracy or political instability. It is within this context that the Ethnic Relations Commission must chart its course.
