When illness strikes the leader...
by Festus L. Brotherson, Jr.
WHEN President Janet Jagan was hospitalised June 30, heightened speculation developed about what exactly her ill health portended should she be incapacitated for an extended period of time. Who would succeed her? What would be the impact of such a change on the ruling party, government and country? More critically, should the President be seriously incapacitated, what would be the effects on already tense race relations in Guyana between the majority East Indian population and Blacks, the second largest segment? At the same time, fuelling speculation of something more seriously wrong with the President than was at first announced was the vague (on the side of caution) official statement about the President's condition with "pains." This, in turn, helped trigger a refocusing on players in so-called A and B leadership teams of the government in the beginnings of yet another political game of succession. These goings-on captured the real world of politics regarding how the leadership succession game is usually played out in Third World countries. Despite what Machiavelli called "the best laid calculations of art," events tend to develop their own momentum and configure in a hop-scotch manner, exerting stresses on the nation's political and economic stability, the ruling party and far too many aspirants for power. Competence becomes sidelined as the central criterion. What matters most is popularity in peer and rank and file circles and power brokerage skills. And given that party and governmental institutional infrastructure tend to be infirm, pliable and many times just simply non-existent, players who control them or show dominant personalities, are the ones that usually emerge as successors or at least "king-makers." This was the lesson clearly derived from the late Indira Gandhi's rise to power in India during the mid 1960s after the quite unexpected death of Lal Bahadur Shastri who had succeeded Mrs. Gandhi's father, Jawaharlal Nehru. There, the principal players had been Morarji Desai, Nijalingappa, and others. In their path-breaking book, "When Illness Strikes The Leader," just how determinable a factor is sudden death or protracted ill health on rulership, other decision-making, and in shaping priorities and general affairs in the entire country, is admirably demonstrated by Jerrold M. Post and Robert S. Robins. The authors make several points of relevance to current circumstances in Guyana. They tell us that, "The politics surrounding the illness of a leader often require that the disabled leader remain in office, for the old cliché that an evil known is preferable to one unknown often holds true..." The cases of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Ferdinand Marcos are usually cited to support this view as well as to reinforce the finding that "...when there is no clear mechanism of succession, the intricate relationship between the ailing leader and the inner circle will be crucial." Significantly, we learn that, "The initially mildly impaired leader, able to work fully in concert with the inner circle, will over time become progressively impaired." More tellingly, say the authors, "What first was a circumstance in which he/she (leader) and the inner circle were managing the public may change to one in which he/she is being managed by the inner circle." In Guyana, the issue of race relations is so central to political life that it alone can torpedo the best calculated leadership successor plans. This is especially so if the 'anointed one' is perceived to have real or imagined failings in this area. One suspects that every school child in Guyana knows by now that by her electoral victory in December 1997, President Janet Jagan became the single most appropriate compromise leader of a fractured Guyanese body politic. Expressed differently, it would have been extraordinarily challenging for any other candidate of the ruling People's Progressive Party (PPP) - East Indian or Black - to keep the nation from an even worse calamitous fate that currently afflicts us. By itself, this fact is testament to the power of racial politics. And yet, even with the obvious benefit of Mrs. Jagan's victory, the patho-morphological ingredients of Guyanese political culture ensured she was pilloried on fatuous grounds of her being a "white woman" and not having been "born in Guyana." The human, John Plamenatz tells us, is not as rational a being as we like to imagine; and is sometimes more rational than given credit. These latter statements make special sense in the context of the illogic of racial politics and the mindset of those who promote it. Rationally, we do know that when major crises visit the main political leader of a country, opportunities abound for mischief-making by the ambitious, the vainglorious and the minimally loyal. Sage Machiavelli advised that by their deeds they will become known over time; except that in the interim they are usually astute enough to charm, bamboozle and otherwise mislead. The level headed leader can, however, flush them out with fox-like cunning since there is usually a tendency for megalomania to overpower caution and to embolden the self-serving. In the early years of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro was extremely skilful at flushing out Anibal Escalante and others by this advice. However, it is much more difficult to do this in a country with good democratic moorings than in one where the slate had been wiped clean of traditional rules (as in Cuba) and new revolutionary ones instituted. The late Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya demonstrated the difficulty with even embryonic democratic moorings. At the time of his death in August 1978, he led an East African nation state that was still wrestling with the form and substance of democratic government in a country whose politics of patron-clientelism he had perfected. The politics of succession gripped Kenyan society between the A and B leadership factions of the one-party Kenya African National Union (KANU). The Kenyatta government brought to an abrupt end all speculation about any preferred or chosen successor. The cabinet spokesman told the nation that a special meeting of the body had decreed that "even to imagine" the death of the President would be treated as a criminal offence! One observer of the Kenya case remarked on how dynamic the leadership succession game had become in the A and B leadership teams: "Like a football team which does not seem able to score a victory under existing rules, they seem to be calling for a change in the rules of the game so that their chances of victory might be boosted. The game, however, is not an ordinary soccer match and the rules happen to be the country's very constitution." Yes. In the context of efforts to reform any nation's constitution, retinkering with rules of succession for purposes of expediency is imprudent politics. Guyana is undergoing such a constitutional reform process. President Janet Jagan is known to suffer with heart problems. Calls for the lightening of her very heavy load are well conceived and should be heeded. What should also be heeded at the same time are additional comments of Post and Robins: "Disease always comes as an uninvited guest, at the table of the great as in the lives of lesser mortals, profoundly affecting the political equilibrium."
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