To share or not to share
RAVI DEV
Kaieteur News
June 13, 2004
THERE is a very interesting debate going on in the pages of our national newspapers about whether or not the PPP and PNC were, or are, committed to “shared governance” in Guyana.
We’ve had various and sundry political heavyweights weighing in on various aspects of this issue but it seems to me that a crucial variable is being overlooked. On what basis and on whose behalf were these parties willing or not to share governance?
This, I posit, is the fundamental issue and if addressed will point to the direction we need to head, politically.
I mean, how could we discuss the sharing of the power to govern if we don’t discuss the acceptable bases of the accretion of that power. We have to deal with the issue of “legitimacy.”
Freddy Kissoon alluded to this issue when he pointed out that Burnham had no legitimacy to dictate terms to Jagan, since the PNC had not won any elections after 1964. But the issue goes deeper than elections.
Both Jagan and Burnham were fully cognizant of the ethnic divisions of the country. From the beginning, they accepted the premise that a Government that included as far as possible the representatives of all the various groups in Guyana would be best for Guyana. This was the rationale for Jagan’s recruitment of Burnham in 1949 (he thought that Burnham would command greater support amongst Africans than Chase) and the rationale for Burnham’s acceptance of the offer. (Many Guyanese forget that Burnham initially earned the ire of the League of Coloured Peoples for “tying bundle” with Jagan – Burnham had been expected to join their political vehicle – the UDP.)
Our political impasse in Guyana, however, arose out of this very premise of Jagan and Burnham – that to form a legitimate Government of Guyana one needed a political party that was “multiracial” or as we would say today, “multiethnic”.
The Government formed in 1953 by the first PPP was truly “multiethnic” but as we all know that was but only a golden moment. The split of 1955 changed all that.
As early as December 1956, Jagan in his speech to the PPP Congress accepted that Burnham’s departure meant the exodus of the majority of the African/Coloured group.
After the 1957 elections, Burnham bowed to the reality that Latchmansingh and Jainarine Singh had brought him no Indian support and coalesced with the UDP – and worked to consolidate his African/Coloured support. Both leaders, however, insisted that they were “national” parties that could govern Guyana – but it is important to note that against all the evidence, they both had to insist that they were “multiracial.”
This was because these two parties still implicitly accepted the fact that no government of Guyana is legitimate if it does nor represent the major ethnic groups of our country.
Sadly, this acceptance of the Guyanese reality has not led to the acceptance of the need for there to be an arrangement to include the representatives of the various ethnic groups in government, but rather the practice of such political contortions as to have led to the paralysis of our body politic.
Jagan for the longest while insisted, that the Chairman of the PPP – a la departed Burnham – had to be African. He lamented the refusal of Kwayana (then King) to play this role and ousted Balram Singh Rai to anoint Brindley Benn. The irony that the African leader in the “multiracial” PPP had to always be the bridesmaid and never the bride was most poignantly (and recently) brought out by the treatment of the good, albeit prolix and tortuous, Dr. Luncheon.
Was it not the good doctor himself, who informed us a few years ago that he was one of the young lions in the running for the PPP’s Presidential Candidacy? The PNC has been equally disingenuous in its efforts at “multiracialism”.
What exactly were Chandisingh’s and Murray’s chances of ever becoming the Presidential candidate of the PNC?
Note that the greater that 50% majoritarian principle is only brought up to legitimise the rule of the party once it can claim to be “multiethnic.” The majoritarian principle is the fig leaf to confer legitimacy on Governments in Guyana and in Guyana this has even been watered down to a “plurality” – that is to be able to garner the largest number of seats among the parties competing in the elections.
The principle implicitly accepted by all the parties is that the Government must have representatives of all the ethnic groups. This is the fundamental principle.
This is the basis of the Civic component that has brought Ms. Rodrigues (Amerindian), Mr. Xavier (Portuguese) and Messers. Hinds, Jeffrey and Lumumba (Africans) into the PPP Government.
Freddy is correct to question Burnham’s moral right to restrict the PPP’s level of participation in any “National Front Government”.
After all, by taking the trouble to rig elections during three decades of widely defined “authoritarian” rule (I have argued elsewhere that it was “totalitarian”) Mr. Burnham was explicitly accepting the legitimacy of majoritarianism on the right to govern Guyana.
He can’t have it both ways. This gap between the implicit acceptance of ethnic inclusiveness and the explicit espousal of majoritarianism has been the contradiction that has be-devilled both the PPP and the PNC.
The PPP, of course, can have its cake and eat it too; up to now it can count on the reflexive support of the Indian majority. It can blithely boast about its “multiethnic” membership - even though PM Hinds can only enter Buxton to turn sod while Corbin is there and while its base is overwhelmingly Indian.
The PNC is caught in its contradiction. In its call for “shared governance”, which is based on an abandonment of the majoritarian principle, it yet refuses to explicitly accept the need of explicit “ethnic” representation for the executive power sharing (one type of “shared governance”) to be legitimate in Guyana. It is still caught in Burnham’s historical choice to spurn the LCP and form an “ethnic” African/Coloured party to protect their interests and refuses to accept that it is an African party. The PNC still wants to insist that it is a “multiracial” party.
Then why the need for shared governance? Shared Governance is premised on entrenched voting patterns in Guyana over the past fifty years. What, if not ethnicity is the basis of that entrenched voting?
To be an ethnic party is not to be precluded from having a “national” outlook. Look at ROAR.
From the moment we declared that we were an Indian party, we could without contradiction demand that there had to be arrangements to include all groups in the Government of Guyana.
The inclusiveness is mandatory in the governance structures, not necessarily in the party structure and membership.
We have espoused a “Government of National Unity and Reconstruction” for one or two terms – followed by federalism.