We are less the prisoners of our history than the prisoners of myths about our history. They underlie many of our beliefs about politics as it relates to how power should be exercised, but more particularly, about who should exercise it. Those myths find public expression periodically, most recently when Mr Hamilton Green made an intervention at the LFS Burnham Foundation Annual Commemorative Symposium last week. There he was quoted as saying: “… if they say he [former Prime Minister and President Forbes Burnham] rig elections I say we should keep rigging to save us from these devils, these bastards, these demons that we have.” He has since apologised both for his comments about rigging, saying he never rigged or supported the rigging of elections, as well as for what he described as his “harsh language.”
But at the bottom of it all was the question of who had the right to govern, and on that Mr Green had this to say: “The history of this country suggests that the only people who deserve to be ‘pon top’ are those whose ancestors suffered for centuries without a cent.” In an interview with Stabroek News subsequently he later qualified this by saying, “ … nobody deserves to be ‘pon top’ and if anybody deserves it is those who toiled for years on the estate and the plantation without a cent. Others who came subsequently benefited from conditions being improved, etc. That is what I meant.”
The argument that the descendants of Africans brought here forcibly have a prior right to power because their ancestors endured unspeakable suffering added to which they arrived before indentured groups is not a new one; it was also heard during the disturbances of 1997-8. The argument, however, has always involved just two groups – Africans and Indians with their respective political parties ‒ no one else. If the right to office were contingent on first arrivals alone, for example, then only the majority of the Indigenous groups would qualify, with the Warraus in particular having the best claim. They are thought probably to be the most ancient people in this region, having lived in our North-West for many thousands of years.
But the Indians are not without their own notions about why they have a greater entitlement to rule in this land. An older one about their pre-eminent capacities in terms of their business skills and the like, has been overtaken by a new one devised by their PPP representatives, namely the fact that they don’t rig elections and the party which represents Africans, does.
The feature address during the symposium at which Mr Green made his comments was given by Attorney-at-law Nigel Hughes. In a letter to this newspaper Mr Vincent Alexander described the essence of his presentation as contending that Guyana’s politics should be rebuilt from Ground Zero. That he defined as the period in the 1950s “when like-minded political aspirants sought to foster ethnic unity as a precondition for nation building, including the attainment of independence.”
Writing in his column last week Mr Ralph Ramkarran had little time for this, arguing that “the recapturing of past historic events as a solution to current problems would be an exercise in futility.” He is certainly not wrong about this, but there is something else too and that is was there ever in reality a true ‘Ground Zero’ period, or is that another of our myths? Certainly all groups operated in harmony at the time, but even Cheddi Jagan realised he needed an African leader to bring the Africans on board, since he had no confidence that as an Indian he could do that. The second point to be made is that there was a common enemy in the form of the British, and even without the events of 1955 it is unlikely that with the British removed from the equation there would not have been a reversion to ethnic politics.
Perceptively Mr Ramkarran wrote: “The struggle for ethno-political dominance since 1955 compels each ethno-political group to relive its own version of events, and to repeat, and argue over them, decade after decade, in order to justify its own claims for political office, as Green did.” His solution to this has been shared governance, which is unlikely to be a solution at this stage, if ever. The thought that the two major parties might cooperate in overstepping the boundaries of the law and indulge in corruption without there being any strong formal opposition in place to object is not something which has wide appeal in the society at large.
Democracy is about many voices, not a single view, and it needs the institutional framework to allow for the articulation of varied opinions and the possible incorporation of some of these into government policies where appropriate. And that requires for a start an opposition party or parties. But there has always been a problem here, and that is that those in power believe they have the right to rule unconstrained by institutions or opposition parties or critics. In short, they are unreceptive to checks and balances.
The problem is always blamed on the Westmin-ster system, but it is far less a consequence of that system per se, than the attitude to power of those who hold office. If a party believes it has a right to be in power, in our ethnic context it is a small step to believing that once there it also has a right to govern as it wishes without curbs on the exercise of that governance.
It so happens that the PPP/C is legitimately in office as a consequence of a free and fair election. So far so democratic. But because APNU+AFC attempted rather crudely to rig the 2020 election, as mentioned above the ruling party has now created a new myth that the opposition is no longer entitled to political space; that the ultimate moral transgression in political terms, against which everything else including corruption and constitutional violations pale, is electoral fraud.
It is accompanied by President Ali’s own contribution to the mythology: i.e. that he can create ‘One Guyana’ by appealing to Africans over the head of their political representatives as well as those unions which he viewed as having a political association. All these were to be excluded wherever possible. He seemed to genuinely believe that this approach was viable, although one might have thought that the teachers’ strike had punctured a hole in that particular daydream.
There is no point in pretending that ethnic politics is about to dissipate soon, although it would be mitigated if there were a greater diffusion of power throughout the society. It would help, for example, if there were more autonomous institutions dealing with the manifold aspects of our increasingly complex local universe, and if those that existed were not bypassed, emasculated or undermined by central government.
It would be helpful too if all the parliamentary sectoral committees were constituted and functioning, and if Parliament itself were taken more seriously by its members. It would in addition make a difference if the central administration allowed more leeway for local government to operate independently, although both need to be monitored to ensure they are following the rules and not siphoning off funds.
There are various amendments to the Constitution which could take some of the sting out of our ethnic political dilemma, but in the end, if a government lacks the will to implement these, there will be no improvement in the situation. If the administration does not observe the Constitution and the laws at the moment, then ambitious amendments to our foundation document will not change its habits. A complete rethink with regard to the political assumptions on which they base their administration will be necessary, and there is no evidence at the moment they have any disposition to do this.
What people would like to see from a government is fairness, and they want their voices to be heard, not necessarily directly, but through any agency which represents them. And it is not for any government to dictate who should represent them.
As for Mr Green himself, no matter what the substance of his revised comments, the historians of the future will make their assessments mostly on the basis of his actions during his long stint in political office.