On March 19, 2004 at the City Hall the PNCR initiated the Hugh Desmond Hoyte Memorial Lecture series to mark the birthday of its former leader Hugh Desmond Hoyte SC who died on December 22, 2002.
Former Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Tyrone Ferguson, and now a lecturer at the University of the West Indies' School of International Relations at the St Augustine campus, delivered the inaugural address in which he looked at the issue of governance.
He was, as he said, able to observe from a unique vantage point the last eighteen months of Hoyte's presidency, a period he described as a "historical moment of great governance challenge."
Because of the challenges of governance which now face the society, Current Affairs believes that his presentation would be a valuable contribution to the debate on the issue now that the constructive engagement process has come to an end, a result some observers long felt was inevitable.
Let me say from the start how deeply honoured I am to have been asked to do this Inaugural Hugh Desmond Hoyte Memorial Lecture. For reasons that will become evident during this discourse, I believe that its undertaking is exceedingly worthy and timely. And I am quite happy to be so centrally associated with it.
A section of the audience for the Inaugural lecture of the Hugh Desmond Hoyte lecture series.
Declaration of Assets/
Declaration of Intent
I attribute my selection to do this Inaugural Memorial Lecture to several considerations. In saying what they are, as I am about to do, I am essentially making a declaration of my assets in specific reference to the present endeavour.
First of all, for the critical last eighteen months of Mr. Hoyte's presidency between 1991 and 1992, I was privileged to be closely and intimately involved with his national leadership at a historical moment of great governance challenge. I saw at first hand his transcending national leadership in action. I not only participated actively and substantively in this grand enterprise of national redemption and reconstruction, but he shared with me in our private moments many of his profound hopes and aspirations for the new Guyana that he and his government had set out to build. Second, I am not a politician nor do I have any political ambitions or interests; I have nothing to gain politically or personally. Third, I can be as objective as it is humanly possible to be in the peculiar Guyana context; I neither belong nor have I ever belonged to any political party or partisan organization in Guyana. Fourth, I have no fear of speaking my mind and letting the chips fall where they may. And, fifth, I do claim some credible credentials of scholarship and practical experience for what I am about to say. But, let me hasten to assure you - I do not plan to indulge in any grand intellectualizing tonight. This is not the time and place for that. Guyana's governance tragedy requires far more than that.
Having given that declaration of my assets, I believe it is now incumbent on me to provide my declaration of intent. I want tonight to essay a perspective on Guyana's enduring and seemingly endless tragic condition. In the process, I want to alert our leaders and our people to the absolute imperative of halting the apparent mad rush to the Haitianisation of our situation and of averting the final ignominy of "failed" state status. The basic proposition is that what will be key to national salvation is the quality of our national leadership and I will pursue this line of argument on the basis of the contention that Hugh Desmond Hoyte represented a new vision and the embodiment of national-oriented leadership. And, finally, I see this as a "cri de coeur" to our leaders, our civil society, our political parties, our Guyanese people across race, gender and religion and, above all, our young people to immediately start the work of redeeming our country.
National Leadership in Guyana
The topic of my lecture is: National Leadership and the Crisis of Governance: Whither Guyana?
I take as my point of departure the following excerpt from a tribute entitled Desmond Hoyte, Statesman, that was done by Ian McDonald in the October 11, 1992 edition of the Stabroek News:
An ordinary politician places the nation at the service of himself. A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. Mr. Hoyte...has placed himself at the service of the country on a number of crucial occasions
Hoyte did not have the charisma of our two pre-eminent nationalist leaders, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan. He did not have the gift of easy people relations that they both possessed. He did not have the oratorical skills of a Forbes Burnham or the revolutionary passions of a Cheddi Jagan. Burnham and Jagan were without doubt men for the season of anti-colonial struggle and national independence. As it was so well put in a Stabroek News editorial of August 7, 1998: "Burnham and Jagan, together and apart, shaped our destiny. We must understand and respect their contributions." But, in shaping our destiny, they were not perfect leaders: they inevitably made mistakes. Because of his long tenure as our first post-independence Prime Minister and our first Executive President, Mr. Burnham obviously bears a bigger burden of responsibility for our dilemma.
But, having said that, let me immediately make something abundantly clear about our political leadership in Guyana and it is quite implicit in that quote I just used from the Stabroek News. You would not hear me vilifying our first generation of national leaders and I am speaking here most specifically of Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. They played their historical role in our nationalist struggle for liberation and independence and what a powerful historical role it was. In the case of Mr. Burnham, he had first shot at forging our national destiny and he had his successes and his failures.
Guyana's first generation leaders
I am firm in my conviction that, despite their mistakes, their excesses, their deficiencies, their overall historical contribution is indelible, incontrovertible and positive. Let us just for a moment think of the following? These leaders had absolutely no training, no experience, no skills, in the management of political economies. They were leaders essentially unprepared for this most awe-inspiring of tasks - and having seen it at first-hand, I know how daunting this task is. They did not have at their disposal a significant cadre of indigenous professionals in terms of the gamut of skills requirements - educators, economists, engineers, scientists, planners, financial managers, sociologists, technicians of various sorts, diplomats - you name them - to support their national development vision and to implement the myriad programmes and projects that they embarked on.
There were no ready-made models or formulas of successful political-economy governance in the immediate post-colonial context. They therefore had to experiment, with the high probability of failure that goes with experimentation. They faced an intellectual elite in the 1960s and 1970s that was unremittingly critical and that demanded radical, in most cases, socialist approaches to national development. And, crucially, notwithstanding the trappings of Westminster democracy, they were all nurtured in an authoritarian political culture, with all the implications for the practice of democratic governance.
I profoundly empathise with these first-generation national leaders. Lloyd Best's judgement in relation to Trinidad's nationalist leader and first Prime Minister, Dr. Eric Williams, could be extended to all our first-generation Caribbean political leaders: "Williams was overwhelmed by the colonial legacy. I am not making excuses for him, because he made fundamental errors. But you could say that coming to office at the time he did, with no history of party politics, no university able to distill for him all that he need[ed] to know, no high priests - a lot of mistakes were perhaps inevitable. You have a political party, but you have no technocrats in the party...you could make certain kinds of excuses because it was the first time. These were men who inherited the colonial legacy, and came to significance under very particular conditions."
So, let us be honest and objective. Let us not be harsh from the apparent wisdom and certainties of hindsight about these first-generation national leaders.
Second generation leaders
It is with the subsequent generations of national leaders that we can be harsher in our judgement. And Hoyte, in my estimation, fell into that next-generation of national leaders in Guyana, as do our current political governors.
It was Hoyte's historical fate to have assumed highest national leadership at an extremely difficult conjuncture of deep-rooted political-economy crisis. The economy, as we will recall, was near collapse and our politics was highly conflictual and suffered from certain anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies. National restoration beckoned as the urgent priority challenge for the new Presi-dent.
In those specific circumstances, more than anything else, Guyana's reconstruction requir-ed a certain quality of leadership. Above all, in the particular context of ethnic and polarized politics, it required a national-oriented leadership, that was prepared to transcend the constricting scope of the inherited sectional or raced-based imperatives and that divorced itself from the temptations and inducements of sectarian politics. It required a leadership of indomitable will, of courage, of a single-mindedness of purpose, focused on one thing and one thing only - the national best interests.
The history of nations has conclusively shown that at historical moments of pervasive and debilitating crisis, the single most important factor that determines national destiny is leadership. Guyana was thus fortunate in 1985 to get the requisite leader who successfully embarked on a twin process of political and economic reconstruction. It was a leadership that was neither primordially consumed by the calculations of pure regime survival nor the primary pursuit of narrow sectional interests. The leadership was fundamentally driven by larger national purposes and interests. President Hoyte's governance laid the platform for national restoration and redemption. Crucially, moreover, it introduced a new culture of political leadership that privileged national, rather than sectional or personal purpose.
Re-birth of democracy
One can debate ad nauseam who has the responsibility for the rebirth of democracy in Guyana. That honour has variously been claimed by the PPP, the combined forces of Guyanese political opposition and civil society interests. Some have even seen former American President Jimmy Carter - who was awarded by the PPP government our highest national honour for his role - and the international community as our democratic saviours. No one can gainsay that all these actors, domestic and external, played their part and vitally contributed to the process of our democratic renewal. But, anyone who fails to give Hoyte his rightful prime place of honour in this regard is merely being unfaithful to the glaring facts of the case. Plain and simple, Guyana's democratic restoration was inconceivable without Hoyte.
That restoration began, even if slowly, virtually on his assumption of the Presidency in 1985. It was practically manifested in his role with respect to media liberalization with the appearance of the independent daily, Stabroek News in 1986, in his decisive settling with the House of Israel and Rabbi Washington also in 1986, in his dispensing with postal, proxy and overseas voting in our national elections, and his reversal of the doctrine of party paramountcy, inter alia.
PNC's culpability for Guyana's plight
But, let me deal with another very important contentious matter with regard to political responsibility. Many voices have over time argued that the PNC should publicly acknowledge its responsibility for our tragic condition and should seek the forgiveness of the national community. The basic argument is that a necessary requirement in harsh and hatred-filled political contexts, where severe wrongs had been committed, is acceptance of responsibility for past transgressions. Here again, Hoyte stood out in his preparedness to accept culpability for the PNC's share of blame for Guyana's plight.
Hoyte's public mea culpa is explicit and manifest in an address he made in 1991 entitled Freedom, Democracy and Development in Guyana: "Over the past twenty-five years of independence, we have been trying to build a nation. For any young country this would be a difficult, tentative process: it has been no different with us. Inevitably, we have made mistakes....what is most important, however, is that during this period of time, we have learnt from our experiences; and we have shown that we have the intelligence and the will to correct our mistakes and chart new and more appropriate courses." But, beyond this public rhetorical act of mea culpa, Hoyte, by his every act of national reconstruction in the years following his assumption of the Presidency was signalling in a more meaningful and impactful way the penance that his party and government were paying for their past transgressions. His mea culpa was most powerfully manifested in the readiness and ease with which he made the ultimate penance - the sacrificing of his office and his party's electoral fortunes by the courageous acts of political and electoral democratisation. His, and his party's fate was effectively sealed by these acts and it was clear to all of us at the time and long before the October 5 elections.
Hoyte's race-blind politics
There is another aspect of Hoyte's vision and practice of national leadership for which all Guyanese should feel especially indebted to him. He was tremendously sensitive to the consequences of our race-based politics. He thus practiced a race-blind politics. Among some of his own supporters he was unflatteringly known as "Desmond Persaud." His profound ideological approach to a non-ethnic or non-racial governance is powerfully captured in his own words in an address he gave, Defining the Future in 1997: "Guyana belongs to all of us who are citizens. To us of the People's National Congress, therefore, all the people of this country are equally important. To us, our fellow citizens are Guyanese, first and last, whatever their ethnic, cultural or religious background....in the national scheme of things, our diversity is merely an incidental matter which should be subsumed in our 'Guyaneseness.' As we seek to strengthen our society and secure the future of our nation, we will have the best chance of success if we do it together as one people - and, that is, a Guyanese people. To us in the People's National Congress, this principle is axiomatic and must overarch all of our thinking, our policies, programmes and our practices."
In his governance orientation, Hoyte laid the foundation for a new type of leadership in Guyana. It was a leadership that was at once national-oriented, non-ethnic and transformational. Both by advocacy and practice, President Hoyte sought to move Guyana beyond the harsh limitations of race-based politics and ideological extremism that had previously proved especially disastrous for the nation's well-being. In a real sense, he was moving the management of the political economy to a potentially higher plane that simultaneously elevated the general national good to its rightful place of priority and primacy and devalued personalistic ambitions and sectional predominance.
The PNC can therefore take pride in this overriding national value that he stood for. It was that national value that was on display when President Jagan died and the entire nation went into mourning and the PNC's leaders and its followers demonstrated a marked respect to the memory of this truly national leader. No one used the occasion to spitefully and bitterly dredge up any negative thoughts or feelings about him. We were all bigger than that.
The big challenge, therefore, for Hoyte's successors was above all to sustain this new leadership culture and to firmly embed it in terms of the approach and practices at the national level. Had this been done, Guyana's destiny would have been irreversibly transformed on behalf of a qualitatively higher political culture and, logically, an enhanced developmental performance. It would have meant that the two pre-eminent political institutions in the country were committed to this new national leadership orientation and ethos.
Guyana's misfortune
It is to Guyana's continuing deep misfortune that the national leadership that it got has not been of this transcending type. It is a leadership that has worsened our essential tragedy. It is a leadership defined by its retrogressive character.
This leadership is distinctively cocooned in the hatreds and betrayals of the past. It is a leadership that is consumed by the quest for revenge and retribution. It is a leadership disposed to punish and to settle scores, a leadership whose historical anger is now translated into a governing culture of "pay-back."
Now, it is wholly understandable for the new leadership and government to have embarked on a reckoning of sorts. After all, they had been in the political wilderness for twenty-eight years. But, to make "28 years" the mantra of your governance, as is the case here in Guyana, was a fatal flaw to national well-being and reconciliation. Guyana's governors today persist in blaming everything on a largely mythical 28 years. But, the fact of the matter is that they are the ones responsible and accountable for our destiny now. No one else is. It is the surest sign of a failed leadership and a failure of its governance that, twelve years after a party has assumed the mantle of government, it continues to blame everything on a receding - and insofar as our young people are concerned - largely distant past.
Nation-building demands that there must be a moment of decisive and unmistakable closure in this regard. It demands that the past must be put behind us and that we must forge ahead.
Memories of hate
You will indulge me a moment if I refer to a quotation from the well-known African scholar, Ali Mazrui, that I had used in my book on the Hoyte Presidency, Structural Adjustment and Good Governance, nearly ten years ago. Mazrui had wisely advised: "But sometimes it is good to have short memories of hate and it is particularly good when it is with each other in our own societies...the secret of nation-building is to know what to forget." Interestingly, in an editorial of June 20, 1995, entitled "Short memories of hate", the Stabroek News had picked up on this theme and had contributed this thought that still resonates loudly in our contemporary condition: "Dr. Ferguson argued that until we can transcend our obsession with the past we are going nowhere...And how right he clearly is....our political leaders are still spending too much of their time fighting irrelevant old battles and not nearly enough concentrating on the difficult problems of economic development, educational progress and improvement of the infrastructure which requires all their energies."
Long memories of hate represent the surest recipe for national disaster in a plural-society context like that of Guyana. Political leadership that encourages and pursues a strategy of long memories of hate tells us that it is not embued with transcending national vision and purpose. It sends the powerful message that qualities of reconciliation, forgiveness, compromise and concessions in the spirit of a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela are unacceptable in national politics.
Long memories of hate serve to pit group against group, making at minimum for a tension-filled politics, but the history of nations shows that more often it conduces inexorably to inter-group relations that could easily descend into internecine violence. It is a strategy of exclusion that results in the marginalisation in Guyana's case of a major, strategically important group in the society. It is founded on a deliberate policy of demonising group members and particularly their leadership. It places a premium on ascription of blame, retribution, punishment and vindictiveness with regard to the specific affected group and leaders, as against the summoning of all toward the long and arduous task of development. It elevates confrontation rather than cooperation in inter-group relations. It panders to the basest passions and instincts of the members of groups in the society.
Leadership indulging in long memories of hate inevitably attracts to its side the extremists and the worst among its followers as its vanguard representatives. It is not long before such leadership finds it necessary to cuddle and cradle criminal-minded elements as necessary protective adjuncts and agents. It is a strategy that descends to the pits of death squads, pervasive corruption and fanning the flames among inter-group activists.
Death Squads
National leadership does not condone death squads. Death squads are what we associate with Haiti, the banana republics of a past era in Central America, the failed states of Africa, with Serbian atrocities. It is the nadir of human political experience. Death squads ultimately do not discriminate; all are at risk. They can consume all of us. And their masters had better understand - they inevitably also turn on them.
Death squads are the ugly and brutal underside of failing and failed states. They elevate and put on a pedestal criminality, conferring on it the status of state policy and, once condoned, it is veritably impossible to control, much more stop. Death squads are a contemptuous rejection of the democratic culture - they are the very antithesis of democracy. And, let me say this clearly - there are no circumstances that justify death squads. Moreover, it matters not to refer to practices of the past as a justificatory basis for such politically base and inhumane policies.
A higher standard of public and political morality devolves on our current national leaders who are wont to triumphally praise themselves as the architects of the return of democracy. There is absolutely no equivalence between bad policies in a past era which was alleged to be non-democratic and worse policies today in a so-called period of democratic flowering.
The Current Crisis of Governance and the
Poverty of National Leadership
So, here we are quagmired in a national crisis of unparalleled proportions. This is the crisis of governance that was so pointedly highlighted in the November 2003 World Bank publication, Guyana Development Policy Review: The Challenges of Governance and Growth. It is the crisis of governance that the Trinidad academic, Selwyn Ryan, has analysed in the most recent edition of the journal, Caribbean Dialogue.
It is a multi-dimensional and deeply embedded crisis of political, economic and social ungovernability. The story at the political and economic levels is well-known and bears no repeating here.
It is the social collapse that, to my mind, is the most frightening, devastating and despairing of our multi-faceted crisis. We see all around us the painful and dehumanising poverty that is taking away the manhood and womanhood of so many of our people. We live with a full-fledged HIV/AIDS epidemic that is destroying our young men and women. Then, we have probably the most destabilizing danger of all - the pervasive drug culture in its trafficking, consumption and corruption manifestations, that are spreading cancer-like and eating away whatever is left of our national soul and threatening to overwhelm us. Relatedly, there is the growing criminalising of our society, the phenomenon of extra-judicial killings and the obvious state-encouraged death squads - the set of social realities that Clive Thomas has characterized as "the pathological degeneration of the state into the routine use of overt and covert violence." Together, they are unprecedented in their depth and entrenchment in the societal degeneration. It is mirrored in growing out-migration not only of our "best and brightest", but every Guyanese who gets the chance, whether legal or illegal, to leave.
The sense of despair, desperation and depression is pervasive and palpable. The proud Guyanese standing tall is but a mere memory. I fear to come home these days not only because for the first time in my life I feel very insecure physically in my homeland, but just as important all I hear is an unrelieved tale of woe and hopelessness, be it from the business person, the University student, the public officer, the security official or the ordinary man and woman. It depresses and saddens you.
So, where do we go from here? How do we get out from this degenerative political culture, this stalled development, this societal squalor?
Institutional governance
There is no shortage of models and formulas for good governance in plural, conflicted societies. The widespread debate that has been taking place in Guyana over recent years reveals our intellectual and philosophical grasp of such models and formulas and the operational foundations for the effective implementation of relevant best practices in this regard. From this, perspective, I have no new insights to offer.
However, the prevailing wisdom today is that institutions do matter fundamentally in conflict-prone societies. Institutions in this sense are conceived as the consensual rules that govern behaviour and that meet popular expectations in terms of equitable outcomes across the range of groups in a society. They are embodied in such mechanisms as constitutions, laws, regulations and the like at the formal level and are driven at the informal level by the shared values and norms that are generated at the societal level. We have seen in other instances of national crisis how institution-creation has been crucial to national reconstruction. This was the case in the post-independent American nation when the founding fathers constructed the durable institutional bases of good governance. More recently, it was seen in the institution-creation in post-apartheid South Africa under the big-minded national leadership of Nelson Mandela.
So, why are we here in Guyana still mired in crisis if we can avail of these relevant "best practices" of good institutional governance? And, if moreover, we have such a wide consensus about their necessity?
Governance institutionalisation in Guyana is incoherent, inchoate, and incomplete. It is not impelled by any observable leadership commitment or conviction or, for that matter, an overlying philosophical or ideological orientation. At the same time, democratisation is in a fledgling stage, it is fragile, weak and bedeviled at the electoral level by a high degree of contentiousness and controversy. Democratisation is nothing more than a work in progress.
Civil society and good governance
Good governance is normally facilitated in societal contexts with strong and vibrant civil societies. As noted by Rashleigh Jackson, civil society is potentially capable of mobilizing indignation and playing a constructive role in promoting democracy and social cohesion. But, in the Guyana context, this is one area where the national governance outlook is still glaringly weak and deficient, and where the outlook is not too hopeful. At one level, civil society is relatively undeveloped, and at another it finds itself contaminated by the past. In other words, it is difficult to find civil society interests that are not tainted by partisan identification with one or the other of the major political parties. Civil society, therefore, is currently ruled out - in terms of the immediacy and urgency of the need for action - as a credible, effective force for governance transformation in Guyana; it is in real terms unable to play an intermediating role, an advocacy role or crucially a role as a substantive pressure point for change. Guyana's political space, in short, remains essentially monopolised, as it has been for over four decades by partisan political forces and even more accurately by the two historically dominant political parties - the PPP and the PNC. What this means is that the will and the impetus for national transformation has to emanate from these two sources either severally or together.
In such a context, national leadership assumes the highest importance in the nation-building process. The proposition here is that an absolutely indispensable element is missing in our diagnostic. That missing ingredient has to do with our leadership. This perspective is well captured by the famous Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe in his book The Trouble with Nigeria: "The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility and challenges of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership." This could very well have been said about Guyana.
When all is said and done, appropriate institutions, models, formulas and constructs, while a necessary condition for good governance, are not a sufficient condition. They are ultimately sub-optimum in the absence of effective and good leadership. This is the crucial lesson of countless historical national experiences when, at decisive moments of governance crises, we see the emergence of outstanding national leaders as agents of transformation.
New ethos of national leadership
It is clearly not too late for us in Guyana to reverse course, to chart a new ethos of national leadership. As was earlier pointed out, Hoyte had set an example in this regard. Our people cry out for it; our nation demands it. There are sufficient voices at individual and group levels that tell us there is a pervasive consciousness of its absolute essentiality if we are not to tip over the precipice and fall into the bottomless abyss of "failed" state status and violent communal conflict.
Since societies, by their very nature, invariably comprise individuals and groups with different beliefs, values and world views, as well as competing interests, underlying conflict is inevitably ever-present. At a national level, it is the effective management of such inherent conflictual relations that tells us about the prospects of any nation because, at the end of the day, we not only must be able to live and co-exist with each other, but we have to learn how to do so if optimum development and relatively stable internal relations are going to occur. And it is here that national leadership is both fundamental and indispensable.
A greater responsibility thus falls to those of us who, by choice, assume the mantle of national leadership as against the ordinary man and woman who are simply content to go about their normal business of living. The type of leadership that a nation has defines the circumstances and the conditions of its people and the nature of their response to those circumstances and conditions. It is an excellent indicator of their life prospects and broader societal developmental prospects. Leaders in the final analysis are the touchstone of the nation's values, its morals, its ethics. Good leaders are the embodiment of transcending national purpose, hopes and aspirations and are able to summon the best of collective efforts for nation-building.
As I read somewhere, sometime ago, and this is especially pertinent in light of contemporary developments in the governing party, good leadership is always providing and preparing for its own obsolescence by its encouragement of younger members to step forward and to demonstrate qualities of leadership. Because, after all, older leaders have to go, they have to be expected to be superceded. And, this is an especially distinctive dimension of the Guyana tragedy where leaders hold on for dear life and thereby condemn our nation and our youth to live in their fossilized and retrograde world.
The argument here, God forbid, is not that we want or expect our leaders to be saints. Because, after all, they are politicians, aren't they? The argument surely is not that they should live the ascetic life of a Mahatma Gandhi because they should get their just material rewards for the sacrifices involved in public service at the highest level. The argument, further, is not that our political leaders must be unmindful of their personal and their parties' political-electoral fortunes. That would be inconceivable and unrealistic in the competitive culture of democratic politics. It is just that we want them to stop politicking after the elections and look after the nation's business which is everybody's business. It is such a vision that Cheddi Jagan spoke about in 1991 when he committed to a policy of "winner will not take all. After you win an election it is necessary to have a broad-based government and broad-based popular support." It is a vision being betrayed by the policies and practices of his successors.
I had read some years ago the following view of the American thinker, Joseph Campbell: "When someone becomes ....President..., the man is no longer that man, he's the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies."
If we agree that the agents of transformation for Guyana are our political leaders, then the critical question is: how do we get from here to there? How do we achieve what can only be conceived as a quantum leap from the poverty of national leadership that currently prevails among our governors to the richness of national leadership that can take us purposively forward to a future that we deserve?
Now, at the broadest level, there are three scenarios that we could envisage to make this possible. The first is that we can sit back and fatalistically wait - and should I say hopelessly - for some form of divine intervention or personal epiphany among our leaders. But the fortunes of man are rarely, in the real world and if ever, written according to such a script.
The second scenario is the more perverse one of the rapid and irrevocable Haitianisation of our condition, with the prospect of external intervention that takes control of our destiny and sets us on the path of national rebirth. With death squads, growing criminalisation and drugs, with latent inter-ethnic violence and final governance collapse, this scenario is not really far-fetched. But, do we really want this? I would think not.
The third is that all of us can assume our historical responsibility as men and women, answerable for our own fate by demanding a new order of politics, a new political dispensation and a higher standard of national leadership. We can in the circumstances say to our leaders - we have had enough, we want a better deal and you had better assume your own responsibility in this regard.
People power
I want now to address in this concluding part of this Inaugural Memorial Lecture a few specific matters.
Factors such as group identity markers - be they race, ethnicity or what have you - are obviously important influences in all our lives, but they do not determine our lives. There is nothing that ordains an automatic or unthinking allegiance, based on identity considerations, to bad leadership and bad governance. We saw this most recently in neighbouring Trinidad when the previous government so shamed its ethnic supporters by the perception that it was involved in widespread corruption that enough of them showed their outrage by either withholding their support or staying neutral in the national elections. The leadership paid the ultimate price for its selfish leadership and its bad governance.
People are not powerless; they are not passive victims, fated to be condemned to suffer for the entirety of their natural lives under bad national leadership and bad governance. Our people do not deserve such a hopeless fate. As I said before, we have suffered too much for far too long.
Our people have it in their hands to do something about it. They have to be sufficiently outraged at the poverty of national leadership, at the endemic corruption, at the death squads, and at the clear and present dangers being posed to our fledgling democracy that together hang as an albatross around the neck of every Guyanese. There has to be the mobilisation of the loud, insistent and persistent voices of our people across age, race, sex, religion or any other identity marker, to demand a better quality of national governance and leadership, as well as real accountability for bad governance.
At the same time, we know that such mobilisation does not just happen. It has to be organised and led.
Because of our past, my own preference is for civil society to assume that burden of leadership. But, as I said earlier, our civil society as presently organised is not equipped to do so. The question is: where does the leadership come from?
The PNC's role
Apart from the PPP, the PNC is Guyana's only other national institution. It has the experience, the organisation, the national outlook and the blend of skills among its top leadership. It thus has to assume its rightful place of national leadership, as it has always done from the inception of its birth in the 1950s, at this pivotal juncture of our nation's history. But, let us be frank. The PNC comes with its own burden of history and this is really the major drawback that it faces today in playing its role in national leadership. It will therefore have to find a way of addressing this impediment decisively and unequivocally. It would be presumptuous and out-of-place for me to tell the PNC what to do in this regard and, anyhow, I myself do not have any such road map.
Yet, there are certain indispensable, minimum requirements that the PNC must meet. It has to define and articulate in unmistakable terms its profound commitment to a genuine democratic culture with regard to both its internal operations and its participation in national politics. Its national leadership, in other words, has to be conducted on the basis of the observance of the democratic rules of the game. It has to make absolutely clear that it has no interest in the use of violence and extra-parliamentary methods as ways of getting back the reins of government.
The PNC also has to find a way of meaningfully, rather than symbolically, engaging members of the other major ethnic group in our society so that they can see and hear at first hand its national vision for Guyana and for all groups in the nation. That is not going to be easy, but it has to be undertaken. Beyond that, there has to be a similar substantive engagement with all civil society and political forces to develop together a comprehensive agenda for national redemption and restoration. And, in doing so, it has to avoid any sense of monopolizing or dominating the process.
In this regard, the PNC has to signal that it has learnt the hard lesson of over five decades of governance in modern Guyana. That lesson is that neither the PPP nor the PNC is capable on its own of governing this society. Our modern history tells us that and whatever you call it - shared governance, national unity governance, coalition governance is immaterial - we have to do it together. The PNC must philosophically, ideologically and practically take the lead in this necessary grand national project.
The international community
The next matter that I want very briefly to address is the role of the international community in our governance dilemma. Let me start off by stating that, from philosophical convictions, I have always had a problem with external intervention in the domestic affairs of countries, and especially small countries such as Guyana. But, I am a realist and I not only understand that it has now become a fact of life in global democratic governance, but importantly, the international community has, for better or for worse, been directly implicated in our modern fate. They were negatively involved in our politics of decolonisation and, in fact, they bear a large responsibility for the sorry state that we find ourselves in. More positively, they were involved in our democratic restoration of the early 1990s and in the ongoing economic reform that we began in the late 1980s. They cannot wash their hands at this time. So, while it is we in Guyana who have the primary responsibility to insist on and regain good governance, we need and must invite the support of the international community. Here our Caribbean partners must play a role. They must not wait, as they did with Haiti, until it is too late to get involved. They must do so now.
And, by the way, the incumbent government cannot have any problem with international intervention. They themselves consciously courted direct external intervention in the late 1980s/early 1990s. They are the ones who gave President Carter our highest national award for his role in this regard.
Guyana's youth
My last comment relates to the following. We have to do this for our young people. We have betrayed our youths for far too long. Let us give them a sense of hope for the future. Let us bequeath to them the highest standards of good governance and good national leadership that will make it worth their while staying and living in this country.
I will end by saying that Guyana is at a watershed moment. When the nation faced another crossroads in the 1980s, Hoyte emerged. He showed us what national leadership is all about. He set the best traditions of good national leadership, the highest ethical standards in office and he bore the burdens of sacrificial public service. In a word, he embarked on the business of implanting good governance.
I know he was deeply disappointed at the swift retrogression in national governance that Guyana now has to live with after all the sacrifices and disappointments that our people have had to endure. The greatest contribution that Guyanese can make to his memory is to work to take us back to the path of national redemption and national restoration.