Dear Editor,
I wish to respond to Joey Jagan’s letter (SN22/03/24) with an analogy in the form of question. If you caught thief up in your mango tree, how would you respond if he asked you to share the mangoes you recovered with him? What if I told you he is a repeat offender; would you hire him to help you run your farm.
Power sharing is not a panacea. It degrades electoral democracy, constrains the government and restrains the opposition. For these and other reasons, agreements are difficult to achieve, hard to sustain and rarely durable even when it is achieved in the voting booth. Politicians are not newborn angels who come with clean hands and open minds. They bring their biases and agendas. Dr Jagan saw power sharing as a replacement for adversarial democracy, but failed at every turn because he could not find a willing partner. He was a special breed but as Joey’s Uncle Derek told me “Cheddi was too honest and too trusting to be a politician.” They don’t make them like that anymore.
Whenever I hear calls for power sharing, I ask myself two questions: What is the problem and will power sharing fix it. I do so because as an idea, it comes with very few successes and many failures. I have never seen a model or a prescription for Guyana but statistically, the odds are not good. We live in a world where more than 100 countries are deeply divided by race, religion, ethnicity, ideology or some other form of ascriptive affiliation. Yet very few have been able to reach some form of power sharing agreement and only handful can be called durable. Malaysia once seen as rare example of success now faces political uncertainty.
Guyana is not one of the 100 countries I referred to above. It is not deeply divided by race as some would have us believe. Guyanese of all races and religions live, work and play alongside each other daily without antipathy. The few instances of ethnic violence were inspired by politicians, once while colluding with the US to destabilize the government. There is no ethnic domination. Power is shared with regional and municipal governments and the judiciary is independent. Elections are now free and fair and always close. No race has the raw numbers to dominate the minority. The 2022 census is not yet available but if the trend line continued, we can expect to see Indians around 37%, Blacks 28%, mixed race 22% and Amerindians 12%. More than a third of the population is neither Indian nor black. Those numbers indicate that no party can win an election without multiracial support and betray the notion that elections are an ethnic contest. Those who make those claims ignore the fact that elections in Guyana boil down to a binary choice between the PPP and the PNC (by whatever name it chooses.) Both parties have held the reins of government, and both have records for voters to compare. The black vote has been faithful to the PNC.
Indian voters have shown a willingness to move in recent elections, but they have no place to go. Many open-minded Indians hold their noses and vote for the PPP because they fear the alternative. That may give elections the appearance of an ethnic contest, but their vote for the PPP has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the unflattering record of the PNC which includes poor governance and a penchant for rigged elections when they hold power. Independent voters face a similar dilemma. They may be inclined to vote for one of the smaller parties but will default to one of the major parties out of concern their “spoiler” vote may cause an undesirable party to win. This may be hard for some people to wrap their heads around but the best thing going for the PPP is the PNC for as long as the PNC is the alternative, the PPP will have an easy path to victory. That is the reality as we await the next coming of Walter Rodney to bring Indians and blacks back under the tent.
Dr Jagan believed in power sharing. The PPP he founded in 1950 was a multi-ethnic party. Dr Jagan reached out to and received support from all racial groups. Burnham was not involved in the planning but was invited to join the party when he returned to the country in late 1949. He accepted and was offered the Chairmanship that was earmarked for Ashton Chase. Unfortunately, his ambition got in the way and after three failed attempts to secure the leadership, he left the party in 1955 to become the leader of a faction of African descendants. His actions split the party along racial lines and race entered our politics. He would go onto exploit the racial divide he created for his political benefit and history speaks to that issue.
In 1964, Dr Jagan extended another invitation to Burnham to join him in a shared government. He offered Burnham the position of Deputy Premier and Leader of the National Assembly. He offered the PNC an equal number of Ministries and a PPP minority in the senate. In making that offer he expressed his long-held belief that a shared government would “prevent racial strife between the two major ethnic groups” and unite the country. Burnham, who was already working with the US to remove Jagan rejected the proposal. That folly of that decision was noted in a memorandum (dated November 14, 1972) prepared for the Committee that oversaw US covert operations. It read:
“With guidance from the US, Burnham refused knowing his position as Premier was already secure. This was a missed opportunity for national unity and reconciliation. Given the racial divide in the colony and the violence that ensued, this was a no brainer but Burnham refused and the rest is history.”
At the All Party Conference in 1956, Dr Jagan proposed that all parties contest the 1957 elections jointly and form a broad-based government. That same year at Ghana’s Independence Celebration he asked Dr Nkrumah and the Caribbean leaders to convene a meeting with Burnham and himself with a view to bringing Burnham back into the fold. Burnham met with the leaders but did not agree to the meeting with Jagan. In the lead up to the 1961 elections overseas based Guyanese actor Ramjohn Holder and Educator Felix Cummings invited Burnham and Dr Jagan to a unity meeting chaired by Ghana’s ambassador to the UN. Jagan accepted but Burnham declined calling them “rats and vermin.”
There were also a few attempts by others. In 1959 the Third Force led by D’Aguiar held unification talks with the PNC but could not reach agreement. Then there was the PNC/UF coalition engineered by the British and US governments to remove Dr Jagan after he won the election in 1964. It was on the verge of collapse within the first four months when personal and fiscal differences between Burnham and D’Aguiar came to a head. It was rescued and kept on life support by US Ambassador Carlson as friction between the two leaders who distrusted each other continued for the life of the government and led to D’Aguiar’s resignation as Finance Minister in 1967. In 2011 voters took matters into their own hands and elected a minority PPP government. AFC flattered to deceive and squandered a rare opportunity to affect the political landscape in the country. The APNU+AFC joint slate in 2015 imploded with a No Confidence vote from within. Subsequent efforts by that group to stay in power by any means destroyed their credibility as a good faith partner in government.
In politics, winners want power and losers want checks and guarantees. The two are not incompatible in electoral democracy. Power sharing is not the remedy for the failure of politicians to mobilise voters with policies and outreach.
Yours truly,
Milton Jagannath
