Recalling comparisons with Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on Wednesday resigned from her post and said she would stand down as leader of the Scottish National Party. She had become, she said, too divisive and was too tired to head the struggle for independence any longer. In 2014 the Scots voted against independence in a 2014 referendum, and while the number of those citizens in favour have increased somewhat since that time according to opinion polls, the country generally speaking is now fairly evenly divided on the matter. While Ms Sturgeon and her party have been seeking a second referendum, the UK government in Westminster has refused to accommodate them, and the SNP’s resort to the Supreme Court on the matter last year ended in failure. How to proceed next is not something on which she has managed to secure the full agreement of her party.
The First Minister told a news conference in Edinburgh that she was of the belief that there was majority support for independence in Scotland but that the SNP needed to grow that support and solidify it. She was quoted as saying: “To achieve that, we must reach across the divide in Scottish politics, and my judgement now is that a new leader will be better able to do this. Someone about whom the mind of almost everyone in the country is not already made up for better or worse. I’ve always been of the belief that no one individual should be dominant in any system for too long.” She has been in office for eight years.
Scotland is a long way from Guyana both in geographical and political terms, but there are elements in this development worthy of comparison. The main difference is that leaders such as Sturgeon as well as Ardern, it might be added, work in a prime ministerial system, albeit a devolved one in the former’s case, while Guyana has a presidential system. As such, if a leader decides to resign in most British-derived political arrangements, then a successor will be elected by their parties under whatever rules obtain at the time. This is how both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak became prime minister last year in the UK. In contrast, our constitution requires that if a president resigns or is removed he or she is automatically succeeded by the prime minister. Given that our major parties tend to be monolithic in nature, it means that the outlook of the new incumbent will differ little from that of his or her predecessor.
There was one case in this country where a president resigned, and that involved Mrs Janet Jagan in 1999, who, it must be said, in a certain respect sounded not unlike either Ardern or Sturgeon. “It is now my firm and studied conclusion that I can continue no longer to offer the nation the vigorous and strong leadership that I had sought to provide during my twenty months as the lawful and duly elected President of the people of Guyana,” she told the nation in a broadcast. However, there the comparison ended. Prior to her resignation there had been a demonstration of political musical chairs, with Prime Minister Sam Hinds resigning his post and being succeeded by Mr Bharrat Jagdeo, who then acceded to the presidency when Mrs Jagan stepped down. Thereafter Mr Hinds was reappointed prime minister. He was not, of course, a member of the PPP, and therefore the party would not accept him as president. So much for ‘new’ leaders in the real sense of that term.
Ms Sturgeon has been accused by some of not being a consensus politician, although her style, whatever its defects, bears no relation to the divisiveness and lack of consensus which obtains here. In addition, while disagreeing with the opposition and her critics, she does not denigrate them, another major distinction between how politics is run in the north of the British Isles and what happens here. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier she herself recognises that she is a divisive figure, not at a personality level, but in terms of her politics, and that voters are fixed in their views about her. As such, progress on the issue which is closest to her heart will be difficult to achieve unless she is removed from the political equation.
It is a level of self-analysis in terms of the political context in which she functions that is unthinkable here. In 2020 this country did get a new face as president, but it turns out he behaves like the rest of his party when it comes to how to achieve consensus, never mind that his mantra is ‘One Guyana’. And as for critics, especially the opposition, they are seen as anti-national. It is a polarising stance which cannot possibly redound to any kind of stability here. Democracy after all is about finding a framework in which divergent and sometimes conflicting viewpoints can operate; it is not about securing a one-think nation.
Neither of our major parties will accept responsibility at any level for the divisions and discord which plague us. It is whichever party is in office at any given time, however, which has to accept the major onus of seeking consensus, because its hands are the ones on the levers of power, not those of its opponents. Yet the current ruling party appears to adhere to the bizarre view that if it controls everything then unity will reign, and that if it excludes the opposition from all areas of political decision-making, even when the constitution requires their input, divisiveness will come to an end. It is not as if it even has an overwhelming majority in Parliament; it boasts the less than modest majority of one seat. Ms Sturgeon’s overall majority in the Scottish Parliament it is true comes from an alliance with the Greens, although on its own it is by far the largest party in Scotland and is the third largest party in the House of Commons after Conservative and Labour. But in our situation the size of the majority is not what counts, it is the willingness to stretch a hand across the divide.
The Scottish National Party has no goodies to toss around, it will have to rely on the traditional techniques of persuasion to change minds, whereas our government believes that now this is an oil economy it is in a position to give hand-outs and the like. This, it assumes, will win over the APNU constituency, and as such it can safely bypass the opposition party which it accuses of divisive tactics with its narrative of discrimination. That party, it is true, is both incompetent and wearisome in terms of its tactics in relation to the last national election, but it sits in the National Assembly representing nearly half the voters of this nation nonetheless. Since this is a representative democracy, not a direct one, to treat the representatives of half the electorate as if they didn’t exist is to treat that electorate with disdain. It is not a formula for cohesiveness and will not win the PPP/C sixty-something seats in the next election, contrary to what it might seem to believe.
While the party is committed to constitutional change, it is avoiding honouring the provisions of the current constitution as long as consultation with APNU is required. As a consequence efficient government is stymied and critical commissions remain unestablished, in addition to which there is no move to appoint a Chancellor and Chief Justice. Are we to believe that the governing party thinks all the critics of this dereliction are guilty of divisiveness? If it does then its view has more the scent of some form of absolutism than it has of democracy. Added to that, who will take its statements about inclusiveness in a possible new constitution seriously if it will not adhere to the few which exist in the present one?
So in the meantime Vice-President Jagdeo continues his time-honoured strategy of denigrating all critics, as do several other ministers along with the President. Why they think that vitriol is an acceptable substitute for rational discussion even in vital matters like the gas-to-shore project has never been made clear, unless they are operating with the assumption that criticism can be silenced via the route of intimidation. Perhaps that may have been true some decades ago in this country, but it is no longer possible in the modern era. A free press, which in fairness they tolerate, and social media will defeat that end.
Democracies are complicated political systems to run, and they are particularly problematic in circumstances like ours. The government might nevertheless find there are useful lessons to be learned from elsewhere.
