Dear Editor,
In reference to your editorial of November 27, 2022, Ambassador Lynch alluded to the ethnic division and other problems. As always, her intervention is very valuable. However, she stopped short of mentioning the primary problem: the pro-ethnic voting, which causes mal-distributions to the base and necessitates side payments to members beyond the base in order to purchase stability. If the latter is not likely to disappear in the near future, what systems can be put in place to minimize its harmful consequences? It turns out that creating these systems is not only the responsibility of the PPP/C, but also the primary representative of Afro-Guyanese: the PNC/R.
Amerindians have also voted for their own party in the past, even though for now they seem to be more aligned to the PPP/C. Many of them may very well go back to voting for their own party in the near future. I do not believe that the PPP bigwigs – President Ali, VP Jagdeo, among others – wake up in the morning and decide to maliciously discriminate against Afro-Guyanese. I can find no systematic discrimination in housing, village works and large infrastructure works, for instance. There is mention of discrimination at the level of banking, but banks must consider problems of moral hazard and adverse selection that are not related to single ethnic group. Mesmerized by a free market agenda, not even the Creole middle class members at the Private Sector Commission want to discuss what it will take to address this problem (In the past, I wrote several columns on possible mechanisms).
Having said that, here is my core disagreement with the PPP/C (but the same argument applies to the PNC/R). That party believes that the distribution conundrum can be solved by a government that derives most of its support from mainly one ethnic base. The way they address this trouble in Suriname, for instance, is for ethnic parties (Maroon, Creole, Indian, Javanese parties and other smaller ones) to compete in elections and then form a government, after which a more formal distribution mechanism – a form of consensus building – is established at the governmental level. It is not a perfect system, it is inefficient and has resulted in an ineffective state bureaucracy (however, this inefficiency does not apply to the well managed state oil company in Suriname), but so too is the present Guyanese system and state bureaucracy.
Not to mention, the Guyanese system produced deadly civil conflict back in the 1960s, kick down the door of the 1980s, civil conflict after the 2000 general election to around 2008, and election rigging as well as attempts at rigging for the purpose of controlling government and mal-allocations of resources. Suriname has not experienced any intercommunal violence at the level of Guyana’s. What they experienced over there was a war between the jungle commandoes and the army, as well as a coup in 1980 and a relatively short dictatorship compared with the one in Guyana – all of which were tied up in some unsavory mal-incentives relating to the control of cocaine and gold smuggling. There is no perfect solution, but the pro-ethnic voting eventually results in pretense and serious discontents; including serious economic misallocations and the logic of sabotage.
Sincerely,
Tarron Khemraj
