Dear Editor,
Permit my response to Mr. Ravi Dev’s letter published in Stabroek News Sunday 13th 2022 edition, “The opposition’s struck-in-the-past mode provided critical opportunities for the PPP’s well-oiled machinery”. Dev’s interventions in national political discourse are usually interesting and often insightful. However, he is guilty of some mistakes he accuses the opposition of. My first observation is Dev is confusing general opposition politics and the politics of the African –Guyanese (African) condition. While opposition politics embody elements of African politics, it is not African politics. I am surprised that with his vast experience on these matters he has failed to appreciate the separation which is historical and evolving and in spite of the oppressive nature of party politics.
This results in Dev advocating “solutions” which may be beneficial to political parties but not necessarily the answer to the historical and present challenges facing the African community. Dev made much of what he called the opposition “stuck in the past,” seeing elections as an “ethnic census”. Here again Dev is not the usual careful analyst. He is ascribing to the opposition a claim that has been advocated by the WPA, African cultural groups and other social and political entities over time. The official opposition political parties’ position has been that elections are winnable despite the race reality. Unlike Dev, I maintain that our elections are an ethnic census. What else it is when the two major parties get 95% of the votes in their race based constituencies ?
Changing demographics is important to the outcome of elections, but that by itself is not enough. Financial and other resources are also important. While the fundamental character of Guyanese elections is an ethnic census, it is possible, as was demonstrated in the 2015 elections, that there can be a deviation from the norm. But the real question is, is it sustainable? In the context of the prevailing dominance of race voting, the claim that the opposition has been stuck in the past is far from the truth. As early as 2005 Robert Corbin and the PNCR promoted the idea of the “Big Tent”. This was an attempt by the PNC to respond to the changing demographics. Dev can’t be that politically naive not to appreciate that the formation of the APNU and the subsequent APNU+AFC coalition was the opposition interrogating the present and moving from the past and adopting to changing realities.
I sense that Dev’s difficulty is not a lack of knowledge but his efforts to give relevance to ROAR’s past positions. In so doing he is inevitably getting stuck in a past narrative. Unlike electoral parties, the politics of the African-Guyanese condition are demographically different given the changes Guyana is going through driven by oil and gas. In sum, these changes can result in a major Guyanese demographic being a minority in their own country and excluded from oil wealth in spite of the state’s propaganda. Our present demographic changes, which Dev is alluding to, cannot be seen as a permanent solution to our ethnic/political crisis since it can be quickly reversed given our potential wealth with Guyanese returning home with their old political habits, which will be encouraged and exploited by our race-based parties.
In conclusion, I pose to the African and Indian political leadership and thinkers to move beyond elections and instead put the national interests above party interests and recognize the changing dynamics of our unfolding realities. Saving Guyana from potential demographic changes by new arrivals that can make Guyanese an electoral minority in the near future. We are open to become potential victims of aggressive inflow of migrants, internal divisions and pointless political rivalry in the context of enormous wealth.
Sincerely,
Tacuma Ogunseye
