Dear Editor,
Like Ralph Ramkarran (‘Shades of Autocracy?’ – SN, September 1), I find the article by Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan, “Whither Guyana: Democracy or Autocracy” (SN, August 27) objectionable. There are too many glaring omissions of fact and of analysis, considering Dr. Ramcharan’s vaunted intellectual and experiential qualifications. In Ramcharan’s opinion piece, he begins by framing his core thesis against an introduction of Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.
All opinion writing is, in essence, self-portraiture, and often the most critical definition of that self-portraiture lies in what is omitted. In Dr. Ramcharan’s case, one very carefully curated omission is glaring – the participation and complicity of the Alliance For Change (AFC) in the most recent attempts to establish Autocracy Inc., here in Guyana. Not only was the AFC part and parcel of the APNU+AFC coalition government, it gave uncontested Executive, Parliamentary and critical support of the anti-democratic excesses of the Granger administration both before and after the attempts at rigging. It is the current AFC leader, Nigel Hughes, who came up with the completely erroneous simple majority calculation and supporting pseudo-jurisprudence upon which the Granger administration mounted its spurious legal challenge to the legitimacy of the No Confidence Vote of 2018, although Hughes himself wisely stepped back from representation of that formula in the subsequent court proceedings; and it is AFC government ministers and party surrogates that led the post March 2, 2020 charge defending the absurdly transparent attempt to rig the elections post facto, a rigging Ramcharan at least thankfully acknowledges. The AFC – without which there would have been no PNCR-dominated 2015-2020 executive, and which currently enjoys several parliamentary seats in the opposition – is not even tangentially referred to in his deep meditation on supposed creeping autocracy in contemporary Guyana.
One of the fundamental aspects of Democracy Inc., is respecting the sanctity of the will of the people as expressed by their voting for political leadership. It might have escaped Dr. Ramcharan that no one in the AFC leadership – with the exception of Hans Gaskin – has given so much as a pro forma concession that they lost the elections to this day. Indeed, just days after the recent election of Hughes to the party leadership, the AFC two weeks ago issued a notably unsigned press release repeating, again without evidence, the unfounded lies, debunked roundly in 2020, that dead people voted, that people who were not here voted, and that the removal of documents in one polling jurisdiction, something since found to have done at the behest of persons in GECOM who supported the coalition’s attempt at rigging, materially impacted the results of the elections. For his part, a week ago, former President Granger, as published on an obscure PNCR online media platform based on an interview done by own personal media machinery, doubled down on the false claim that the process was fundamentally flawed, something the CCJ, local courts, as well as independent observer reports brutally rejected time and time again. I quote the August 25 article on that interview:
“Former President David Granger speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – explained that the ‘Holladar effect’ was the result of a sequence of court rulings aimed at deliberately displacing the Elections Commission as the authority for determining the outcome of elections, deterring the presentation of legitimate declarations of results, disrupting the electoral process and, thereby, defeating the expression of the will of the electorate.”
Notably, Granger has yet to produce the SOPs upon which he and his government officially celebrated his ‘reelection’, just as how Maduro is yet to produce the Venezuela’s official electoral documentation supporting his. Finally, there is in Ramcharan’s piece – and this was dealt with extensively by Ramkarran and Dr. Randy Persaud (‘Ramcharan falls into a right-wing trap’ – Demerara Waves, August 28) – a deliberate inflation of the actions of the current Irfaan Ali administration to “shades of autocracy”, and more conclusively “The spirit of governance smells of autocracy”. His evidence? Linking actual institutional attacks on NGOs and the judiciary as chronicled in Applebaum’s book to verbal criticisms here made by government of NGOs and judicial decisions. It must be a shock to the renowned academic that, by his logic, the current United States Biden administration is profoundly anti-democratic, questioning as it has the integrity not only of recent Supreme Court decisions (Presidential immunity, the Roe vs Wade reversal) but also the impartiality of some Supreme Court judges; this in addition to pointing out the politically-defined agenda of some NGOs, like the Heritage Foundation, which has authored a definitive blueprint for a new Trump Presidency, Project 2025, even though Trump continues to deny the clear connections.
It does not help any case on behalf of Ramcharan’s [implied] objectivity that he, uncourageously, tenuously links his unproven thesis for “shades of autocracy” to an unnamed PPP “Oracle”, clearly Bharrat Jagdeo, who he projects – once his [Ramcharan’s] nebulous vision for power-sharing is in place – “will remain an irrelevance in the judgement of history”. Of course, in order to fortify the paucity of the intellectual gruel of Ramcharan’s original piece, which it not only published but based an article on President Ali’s response, Stabroek News in its editorial ‘Democracy v Autocracy’ (September 2) engaged in the same sort of contorted false equivalency that seems to be en vogue, wherein basic acknowledgement of the excesses of the Coalition need to be ‘balanced’ with the inclusion of some ‘equal’ critique of the PPP. The editorial notes: “The most recent example of a rigging mentality he [Ramcharan] gave was the attempt of 2020, although he might have noted the fact that APNU+AFC’s anti-democratic disposition as a government was apparent even before this, when it employed a number of stratagems to avoid calling an election following its loss of a vote of no confidence in 2018. Had it gone to the polls when it should have done, it would have expunged some of its unsavoury history, and would have shown up the PPP’s democratic shortcomings when in a similar situation it prorogued Parliament in 2014 to avoid a general election.”
President Donald Ramotar’s [constitutionally sound] prorogation was cynical, it was desperate, it was the depth of reactionary political expedience, but nowhere can it be compared to the freight train of undemocratic and unconstitutional intent of the Granger APNU+AFC administration that first found significant traction in October of 2017 with the unilateral appointment of retired 84-year-old Justice James Patterson to the Chair of the Guyana Elections Commission (almost ten months after the retirement of former GECOM chair Dr. Steve Surujbally); Democracy Inc., had finally had enough in August of 2020 and forced Granger and his APNU+AFC out of power with the threat of sanctions after five months of them indecently clinging on to power post-elections. The establishment and maintenance of democracy is a constant, often tedious, exercise involving a multiplicity of players, some far more naturally informed than others. The role of the public intellectual is an indispensable one, a constant corrective measure against the ignorance of the masses and the often power-hungry excesses of political leadership.
Sincerely,
Ruel Johnson
