This is the fifth entry in a series on civil society.
Guyana needs to systematically address the need for reconciliation and building trust in the face of the continued breakdown of it social fabric, according to Guyana’s commissioner on the Roman Catholic Church’s Integral Human Development Commission for the Caribbean Lawrence Lachmansingh.
“I know the government and opposition are thinking about these things. It all comes back to this Catholic thing about reconciliation and trust and who we are. We are just too small to not come together. As the saying goes, ‘one hand can’t clap roti,’” Latchmansingh told Sunday Stabroek in an interview.
According to him, the Roman Catholic Church continues to be concerned about issues of reconciliation and trust in the country and the general breakdown in relationships, including ethnic and social deterioration.
“The church was worried and remains worried about what is going on and how the politics is feeding into what is happening at a wider social level with our citizens,” he said.
Optimistic about the prospects of Guyana finding solutions, Lachmansingh said, “I do facilitation as a profession and every time we bring people together, no matter how difficult the issue, once we create the right environment and organise and design the engagements wisely, people respond positively. It is why we push dialogue as a tool of reconciliation and of democratic rule.”
Elections are part of the issue and there is need for a healing process, he noted, that involves reconciliation and restoring trust and confidence, which the church has been calling for.
“We would certainly like to see other actions being taken by other civil society groups and of course by the government, which is still the most resourced entity in the country when it comes to staff and budgets.”
Noting that a lot of mistrust exists in the society, Latchmansingh said the Ethnic Relations Commission and the Guyana Elections Commission have to instill public confidence and help to build some of these bridges across the divides that are growing.
“I feel like all of us need to find a quiet place where there are no microphones or cameras and just have honest conversations about how to get out of this hole we have dug for ourselves in terms of relationships. We cannot get out of this as one party, one ethnic group, one sector, or one industry. We have to find ways of talking constructively and not shouting at each other.”
As Guyana grows economically and the country benefits financially from the oil windfall, he said, “many, including our political leaders, have been cautioning that we have to be careful as a country not to let the money run away with us. We saw what happened with bauxite and we don’t want to see the ‘Dutch disease’ in Guyana based on one commodity. We don’t want to see a society where there is this huge gap between the haves and have-nots. The poor does not only need handouts but sustained livelihoods. We have to figure out these things or we will have a society which is deeply divided on financial and material things or we will have prolonged social conflicts which feed back to the earlier point I made about reconciliation and trust,” he said.
“If we are not reconciled with one another at an economic level, we are unlikely to generate the kind of social trust that allows people to work effectively with each other. It is no secret that money can’t buy you happiness, love and a lot of things,” he added.
Cooperation over competition
Latchmansingh said civil society groups may be a bit weak because they do not have the resources to do what they would like to do, especially in the area of democratic governance. “They may have a handful people with no budgets and no staff for the most part to do the stuff they would want to do. So there is a natural imbalance in the way civil society works in society. After a while, I fear that our voices are our only actual resource. We have social websites, the media, where we can amplify our voices using what is freely available,” he noted.
Democracy and governance groups, he added, are supposed to be in the voluntary sector and not tied to the political or private sector or they would be economic or political forces.
He said individual civil society actors and civil society groups should all have voices in what democracy calls “consensus.”
Partnership is what a democracy is trying to instill, he said, but in Guyana the situation has become competitive and adversarial. “We need a bit of competition to keep ideas flowing but it can’t be competition all the time. We got to cooperate at some time. We have taken the competition to such levels that everybody is just shouting at each other and sometimes I fear that that is how the political parties are. Equally civil society does not have the capacity to partner and so end up shouting at each other too.”
Noting that donors are not well resourced, he said, recently they have been saying that Guyana is an oil and gas country so resources for civil society should not be an issue. In future as the country matures financially, he hopes, civil society can find more ways of raising finances domestically.
Latchmansingh also said civil society is not without blemish for its perceived diminished role but at the same time political issues have become a challenge that need to be fixed, like electoral reform, to create a balance based on trust across the sectors so we there is genuine social partnership.
It was also true, he said, that the private sector has been playing a kind of civil society role for a while. He recalled the private sector being involved in the free and fair election effort in the 1980s and 1990s. The private sector provided the Electoral Assistance Bureau with resources that included computers and vehicles to observe those elections because of concerns of fair elections.
“I know there are accusations of the Private Sector Commission being in one political camp and so on. I know there are also governance committees in different private sector bodies. I know they have to be a little bit careful about conflicts of interest that arise if they try to straddle a couple of these sectors because of accusations of trying to influence government,” he noted.
Using an oil company as an example, he said if it were to start pouring money into a particular governance issue, like the electoral system or constitutional reform, or something to do with corruption, the process will struggle because people will question their influence and whatever comes out of that process will be tarnished because people will say the private sector controlled and drove the outcome. “You don’t want that kind of problem in your policy making process. Academically, I would say it should not be a norm for private sector to be too involved in civil society issues,” he added.
Legitimacy test
Meanwhile, chairman of the Governance and Security Sub-Committee of the Private Sector Commission (PSC) Gerry Gouveia, explained the posture of the body thus: “The private sector will have to work with whichever government is in power. The private sector will like the government in power who pays attention to the things that are conducive to private sector development. If you have a government that is raising taxes and refusing to meet with the PSC then the PSC will not like you. You have to also earn the respect of the PSC.”
For example, he noted that the former APNU+AFC government dropped the value-added tax (VAT) from 16 per cent to 14 per cent on certain items then placed VAT on everything else, including interior flights.
“When the PSC tried to talk to the government they would not entertain us. The PSC wants a government that will sit with us and help to create policies to support the private sector. The private sector is the one that creates jobs and pays taxes. You don’t earn the respect of government by sucking up to the government. You earn the respect by being responsible and making constructive contributions to national development and giving meaning to public/private sector partnership.”
Gouveia, a past Chairman of the PSC, said access to government is not a matter of having bigger resources but it is a matter of legitimacy. PSC members have access to government because government is comfortable with their legitimacy because they represent a subsector of the private sector, he said.
“But in my opinion access to government is something you have to earn. If you are an irresponsible organisation or individual always talking crazy things without proper research, government will not want to deal with you.”
When he became the president of the Tourism and Hospitality Association of Guyana (THAG) in 1996, he said, “THAG had no relationship with government and used to fight with them every day. I went to then Minister Michael Shree Chan that time and asked to meet with him. We started to talk and develop a relationship with him. We did the same thing with the Aircraft Owners’ Association. We started meeting with the transport minister and talking about reform of the law, reform of the system, runways that needed to be fixed, etc.”
He said civil society organisations must have substance, structure and legitimacy. “You got to have rules, constitution, regular elections to choose leaders and annual audited financial accounts.”
Gouveia further added that the PSC, an umbrella body, comprises legitimate organisations that meet legitimacy tests. “Before you join the PSC you have to demonstrate that you meet the legitimate test so your voice becomes a legitimate voice of your constituent. You can’t have an organisation that does not hold elections, has two or three members and expect that the government will consult with you. Every individual in Guyana has a right and that right is exercised at elections to determine whether the government in power will be reelected based on their behavior and performance.”
To demand that government consult with every single individual is a little impractical, he said.
“That is why organisations become the representative entity of citizens but Government can also consult at the community level with individual citizens.”
When there are national or regional disasters, the PSC networks and garners resources to help the communities, he said recalling how the PSC mobilised resources from among its members and the wider community to assist Grenada following Hurricane Ivan, La Soufriere’s volcanic eruptions in St Vincent and the Grenadines last year and Dominica following the passage of Hurricane Maria.
The PSC, he said, also meets with other civil society organisations, including trade unions, to arrive at consensus on national issues that may be of common concern. A civil society grouping had met on a weekly basis following the 2020 no-confidence motion. “The no confidence issue was a very straight forward issue,” he said, “but when you end up with people trying to justify the position of one political party and that 33 was not the majority of 65, you start to have that kind of discussion it made things difficult. It existed for a while and then fizzled out
