Since about 2000. the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has been using all manner of undemocratic and discriminatory means to force Africans into its ranks or migrate. But the ethnic political situation in Guyana is coming to a head as that party comes under pressure from those who facilitated the transfer of power to it in 2020 insist that Guyana’s winner-takes-all political system be reformed and the framework for an inclusive functioning democracy be created before the next election.
As a result, the PPP has become frantic: we have seen its undemocratic meanderings during the last local governments, its ministers now openly informing the public that it needs to vote for the PPP to receive community services, its openly attacking IDPADA-G, whose pro-African objectives contradict those of the PPP, President Irfaan Ali’s award-winning spectacles, visits to barbershops and African Guyanese areas in New York, etc.
Let me say about the last item: it matters not how severe a conflict, in all historic multiethnic situations, e.g. South Africa and the United States, there are usually some naysayers. Donald Trump has made countless offensive remarks about Africans, but according to Edison Research, Trump’s support among African Americans in 2020 amounted to at least 12%. In 1973, Yine Sharp identified some 198 methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion, and it is for the affected groups to devise sensible policies to mitigate the effects of such activities on their agenda (The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston, Porter Sargent).
Last week, contextualizing the present dispute between the PPP and IDPAD-G, I demonstrated that from 2010, when states were called upon to develop policies for the international year for People of African Descent (IYPAD), the PPP has been deliberately trying to undermine African solidarity. Now President Irfaan Ali, having heard that Suriname’s President Chan Santokhi, who also heads a long-established Indian-orientated political party, had been able to win a reasonable proportion of African votes in the last election, is seeking to do the same in Guyana without considering how fundamentally different the two situations are.
Firstly, born in 1949, the year before the PPP was formed, and having been in various coalitions since 1958, Santokhi’s party does not have an ethnically charged legacy in which hundreds of people have and are still losing their lives in ethnic contestation rooted in political majoritarianism. Indeed, although his party has been mainly supported by Indians over the years, it has frequently been allied with parties that have historically represented the Afro-Surinamese community.
Secondly, Suriname does not have a de facto winner-takes-all political situation. Indians are 27.4% of the population, Maroons 21.7%, creoles 15.7%, Javanese 13.7% and mixed people 13.4%. Power has always been shared: one must win sixty percent of the parliamentary vote to become president. Surname is politically a multi-ethnic society not a bicommunal one in which one ethnic party has sought to dominate by suppressing the other group for nearly a quarter of a century. Thirdly, Guyana’s constitution gives to the leader of the ruling party in office effective de facto control over the presidency and the legislature and thus significant influence over the judiciary.
Indeed, what Suriname demonstrates and what President Ali would better try to understand and encourage is that without the winner-takes-all situation and the fear that one group will dominate and use the state in the interest of its ethnic supporters, the doors open for the gradual establishment of genuine, not manufactured, multiethnic support that could also lead to the creation of real not fictional ‘multiethnic’ political parties dependent upon massive election manipulation to hold on the government. Those propagating ‘One Guyana’ would do well to go to constitutional reforms with the political structural vision of Suriname in mind rather than with the domineering spirit that now pervades the political sphere and has led to all kinds of disasters.
For example, last week, part of the roof at the Stabroek market collapsed (thankfully there was no loss of life). Nothing demonstrates better the dangerous lengths to which the PPP is prepared to go to establish its political dominance. Over decades, the city council been deliberately starved of resources and more importantly objective central government oversight, so that the PPP can blame the PNC for the city’s disgraceful condition to win political control. The choice this autocratic PPP has left the citizens of Georgetown, who are mainly Africans, is to exist in these dangerous conditions under their democratically chosen representatives or vote for the PPP!
Way back in the late 1990s, Desmond Hoyte’s PNC government recognised that the City Council was institutionally decrepit and was – as it still is – unable to properly manage the city without substantial institutional strengthening. Hoyte negotiated a US$2m Urban Development and Housing Project, to do a feasibility study of the sector, resulting in a US$25m UNDP-funded urban development project.
When therefore, in 1992 the PPP first came to office, it found an urban development programme with institutional strengthening as one of its main pillars. Drafting the project began in 1993 and was completed in 1995. But dealing with the condition of the city was not a priority and further work was suspended until January 1998, ‘when Government gave the project its highest priority’! The first disbursement was made in August 2000 and the last in June 2007.
Lo and behold, in the context of such decrepitude, the 2009 Commission of Inquiry into the Operations of the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown found that while the UNDP programme was intended to focus on infrastructure development and institutional strengthening, ‘the programme focused almost exclusively on infrastructure development’. To this day, the anticipated institutional strengthening results have not materalised as the PPP blames the PNC for being unable to properly manage the city in the hope of winning city government.
From a democratic perspective, the general approach of the PPP is conceptually fatal to it for almost everything it is doing to try and win African support is demonstrating that it cannot win government and/or sensibly rule Guyana in a liberal democratic manner! Of course, there are those within its ranks who believe that it will be able to convince the powers that be to accept that in Guyana’s ethnic political environment higher levels of autocratic behaviour are inevitable!
However, political theory and practice have long outgrown this kind of Singaporean excess and it is now widely recognised that countries such as Guyana can be organized to in a liberal democratic manner. Two of the foremost proponents of this view, Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair, were recently in Guyana and just missed the collapse of the Stabroek market roof!