There must be many of us in the Caribbean who in consideration of some matter or other have had some lyrics of Robert Nesta Marley (6th February 1945 to 11th May 1981) spring to mind.
This is precisely what happened when I was considering President Irfaan Ali’s comments earlier this month on the ethnic situation in Guyana. He is widely reported to have said that all of us are ‘consumed’ by racism and individuals are opportunistically using it to solidify their own position and ‘deliberately misconceive things and repackage and disseminate it in a manner that promotes sentiments of hate, racial feelings and distrust between the people.’ He called upon all of us to criticise those who use racism for their own selfish reasons. He said his government is ready and willing to work with every section of Guyanese regardless of who you voted for or how you look, to help them realise their aspirations. The first two lines of the following well known question from Bob Marley came to mind.
‘How is there going to be peace
When there is no justice,
Oh no, Oh someone is taking more than their share
Of the bounties of this land and that’s not fair
So little people got more than they need
While there’s so many hungry mouths in the world to
feed
Tell me how is there going to be peace
When there is no justice….
Make no mistake, although surprising coming at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the president was not the first to make the above kind of comments only to have been confounded by their context, thus giving Dr. Ali the opportunity to repeat them again. In his address to the nation just after the 1964 elections, Forbes Burnham also indulged in this kind of wishful thinking. According to him, the ‘apparent’ ethnic cleavage that existed in Guyana was brought about by the dishonest, deceitful, opportunistic and racist propaganda and policies of the PPP that had been able to convince a large section of the population to vote against the PNC. He claimed that all the peoples of Guyana are equally important and would be treated as such by his party. The enemies of Guyana wanted to see it divided but beginning immediately his government would behave fairly and demonstrate to PPP supporters that there was nothing to fear but all to celebrate.
To those who might be tempted to dismiss my interpretation of Marley’s contention by claiming that Guyana and the Caribbean are largely peaceful places, I accept that the world as a whole is a more peaceful place than it was a few decades ago. However, it is important to note that there are ‘negative peace,’ i.e. the absence of actual hot wars and fear of such wars, and ‘positive peace’, the existence of attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful and progressive societies. Marley’s statement is relevant in both cases but the latter is more pertinent to Guyana and the Caribbean.
Marley’s suggestion that ‘There is no justice [and that ] [s]omeone is taking more than their share,’ raises two important questions: what is a ‘just’ share and who determines it? These two issues are vital elements of political leadership and are extremely context-dependent and problematic. I suspect that Bob Marley was speaking to both local and global inequalities – which have grown exponentially since his time – but he was framing his argument from the perspective of Jamaica, an homogeneous country with 92% of the population of African descent. Class divisions are not as potently divisive as race/ethnicity but this is not to contend that the management of class societies, indeed rulership in general, is not fraught with complications.
In Christian theology there is the Old Testament story that God, the epitome of justice, when He dwelt among men became so frustrated that He threatened to destroy all the children of Israel and begin again with Moses and his family, hoping that they would be more compliant. Thus, he said to Moses, ‘How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them? I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you (Moses and his decedents) into a nation greater and stronger than they (Numbers 14:11-12).
The responses of Forbes Burnham, President Ali and the detractors on both sides are largely concerned with race/ethnicity and framed to deal with only the first of the two questions. As if they have no history that could be interrogated, they deny culpability, promising to be transparent and just in the future. Their stories are similar and go as follows: we on this side have been the victims, we have not been spreading ill-will, manipulating elections, colluding with external forces, discriminating, etc., and having been placed in government, we will demonstrate by our good deeds that we have been wronged!
Although they are complaining about race the political leadership and their flocks avoid the second most potent question: who determines what is a fair share? As indicated above, even without ethnic estrangement, national political management is extremely difficult and some would say that it is made so by two persistent trends in human history: man’s struggle for a reduction of the working day without a similar reduction in his standard of living, i.e., an increase in leisure and the enlargement of personal and social freedoms.
Recognising the contemporary difficulty of finding a working social consensus among men about what is fair, just, etc., Thomas Hobbs concluded that in the beginning life must have been ‘nasty, brutish and short’ and so he surmised that men agreed to establish a social contract to live under a dictatorship. However, given the human propensity to be free, Hobbs’ dictatorial theory was soon abandoned and one of his outstanding successors John Locke argued that ‘when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual (unanimity), made a Community, they have thereby made that Community one Body, with a Power to Act as one Body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority’
I take this to mean the constitution of the community must be unanimously agreed upon and the legislative and other rules should be based on majoritarian principles of various sorts if a working consensus is to be realised. In passing, during the ratification of the constitution of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who was to become its third president, supported the unanimity rule, i.e. that all thirteen states should have to ratify before the federation could be established.
The Guyanese dilemma rests in the fact that there are huge politically visible ethnic groups existing side by side, the political activities of which the politicians constantly complain but do nothing significant about. To gain consensus and legitimacy in this context the foundational rules that determine what is ‘just’ and who shall be the judges must be made and constantly updated by at the very least ‘substantiality all of us’. Only such a political framework can provide the kind of accountable governance that could make Marley’s questions sufficiently malleable and accommodative of normal political justice, peace and prosperity.
