12 years of PPP rule
Freddie on Friday
Kaieteur News
July 23, 2004
Part one – Disappearing dream
The ruling PPP is just months away from achieving a full dozen years in the administrative and legal control of the Republic of Guyana. I chose deliberately to leave out the word “political” because for reasons of incompetence, weakness, loss of credibility, the nature of political sociology and demographic reality, the ruling party is not in overall political control of the affairs of the country. I hope before the series finishes to explain why this is so.
Except for those who are in control of the state machinery, the rest of Guyana, the Guyanese diaspora, academics who study this society and diplomats familiar with Guyana’s evolving socio-political structure, would admit that this country stands at the crossroads. It is anyone’s predication what will become of Guyana.
Since life has its own, unforeseen logic, one should never discount the glorious return of the role Guyana once played in the West Indies. Guyana then, should not be discounted to rise again like the proverbial Phoenix. But the analyst has to make predictions based on trends he/she has seen over time. And over a long period of time, say from 1953, Guyana has lived a tragic life. There were flickering moments of incandescent hope – a short period with Hoyte after 1988 and with Cheddi Jagan between 1993 and 1995, but overall, this country has never had an enduring period of peace, stability and impressive growth.
Everyone, whether inside or outside of Guyana, who has a more than passing interest in this country, is sleeping uncomfortably and will do so until 2006. It is not because of runaway crime; crime is a problem for even post-modern society as the British are now realising; it is because of the trepidation that political disagreement which has dogged us for more than fifty years and which has threatened to sink us so often since 1953, may finally drown us come the next election.
There can hardly be any disagreement, if one is seriously objective about the causes of political stagnation since the fifties – the torrid unending confrontation by the main political actors who have subordinated patriotic sentiments to the quest for power. But try as hard as we can to locate the reason in that perversity, the analyst cannot divorce him/herself from an analysis of the seminal turning point in 1992 when that triumphal and ennobled opportunity came to all Guyanese to turn their backs on the 40 years of bitterness and traumas. It has not happened. We are as bitter and traumatic and traumatised as we were before 1992.
To understand this phenomenal failure in take-off politics, a hard and objective look must be taken at the 12 years of the new PPP leadership that came to power in the final months of 1992. Why are we still poor and only in front of Haiti in the CARICOM family? Why are we still viewed with pariah eyes by our fellow CARICOM citizens? Why was a violent country like Jamaica given visa exemption to EU countries after the Treaty of Maastricht was signed and not Guyana that had erased its authoritarian image after 1992? The Canadian High Commission has chosen not to reopen its consular services here even though Guyana has returned to democracy twelve years ago. Why?
But more fundamentally, what has changed since 1992? Fear stalks the land. Fear of criminals. Fear of victimisation. Fear of political violence. Fear of discrimination. Fear of what will happen if you don’t have a party card. Our disappearing infrastructure was reinvigorated after Guyana rejoined the International Monetary Fund in 1987. But our potable water is still not safe to drink after 16 years of rejoining membership in the international lending agencies, and in a country that has absolutely no evidence of water contamination due to industrial pollution. Our electricity supply is as erratic as when the economy collapsed under Forbes Burnham.
But who is Forbes Burnham? He died in 1985. In a country where over 75% of the population is under 35 years, a large chunk of our population do not know who is Forbes Burnham. The ebullient Guyanese youths, who embrace the Atlantic Ocean everything night from the Pegasus Hotel to the Texaco gas station on the Georgetown seawall revelling in bacchanalian pleasure, do not know who was Forbes Burnham. Yet we live with an infrastructure that was reminiscent of when he ruled Guyana with an iron fist.
So really what has changed since that phenomenal moment in 1992, when we grasped life’s glorious opportunity? The prodigious expectation was that Guyana would never return to the dark days when egotistical leaders rule the waves and people had to buy flour and potatoes and hide them under their clothing to avoid prosecution. I remember only so well the final hours of autocratic rule as it was about to crumble
The election headquarters on Croal Street, rented from Mr. Juman Yassin, was under siege. I was trapped inside the building with one of the most outstanding citizens this country has produced, Father Andrew Morrison. Bricks and bottles rained down on the façade of the building. Enrico Woolford and Cecil Griffith showed no sign of fear and Enrico, in particular, was his humorous self. But I couldn’t enjoy his witty remarks because all I was thinking of was my baby daughter.
I came face to face with the bravery of European journalism as I saw two German cameramen just oblivious to the hardened objects being tossed over their heads as they filmed the assault on the election headquarters. I peeped out through a hole in one of the broken panes to see an elderly Ptolemy Reid (now deceased) directing the stone-throwers. I remember when I was growing up, of being told of his violent role in the sixties. Now as a young man, I saw it for myself.
That afternoon, the fires and the looting started and remembering those two German cameramen, I braved the violence to record the mayhem, parts of Georgetown were going through. I still have not gotten over the shock of seeing one of the prettiest women in this country, the wife of one of Guyana’s top racing car drivers, directing thugs as they tried to torch Ravina’s Store on Water Street. That evening, President Hoyte ordered the police to put down the rioting. The next day, Jimmy Carter announced his findings – the PPP had won the election.
Here was a new day, a new dawn, a dream come true. Twelve years after, what has become of that dream?
Tomorrow – part 2 - Euphoria
Part 3 – Cheddi Jagan stumbles
If there was no western destablisation of the Jagan government in the sixties and if Burnham didn’t descend into psychological diabolism, one suspects Cheddi Jagan would not have achieved the level of greatness that he is now known for. Indians in the diaspora flooded back to Guyana in 1992 to work with this great man whom the world had done such a terrible wrong to.
My honest opinion of Cheddi Jagan was that he was indeed great, had no authoritarian instincts, was beyond corruption to the point of moral impeccability, had no deep-seated animosity for his enemies, was incapable of arrogance but had a deep-seated insecurity complex in his personality make-up and that drove him to exclude working, at the level of power, with other groups outside of the mainstream of PPP thinking. The tragedy of that sin Guyana is paying dearly for
It is my heart-felt belief that the politics of exclusion that we now see as the overarching characteristic of the PPP government began with Cheddi Jagan himself in 1992. There can be no denying the excellence of this Guyanese hero but this county awaits the definitive biography of Dr. Jagan. It must not be written by a sympathizer or by a competitor. It should be the work of a scholar distant from Guyana with no friendship on either side. When that study is done, some of Jagan’s faults would be as graphically painted as his heroic qualities.
One thing his son, Joey Jagan must understand, with each day as he grows older, and one hopes, wiser, he must be able to come to grips with the frailties in his father’s methodology. I didn’t use the word “thinking” because even if your thinking is faulty your methods of doing things can still be admirable. Jagan had problems with both his world vision and his approach to power. For the purpose of this essay, we will concentrate on the latter.
Joey Jagan must understand that the deceptive, evasive and secret nuances that permeate the characters of the current PPP leaders he so bitterly condemns were grown in them by the master himself. Today, when you speak to a minister, he nicely tells you, “Go to Mr. Jones and tell him I said to give you the document.” Mr. Jones can push you around a million times and you can go back to the minister a million times. But the minister would never pick up the phone and call Mr. Jones because it is all a game. You are not getting the document, and you think the reason is because of Mr. Jones and not the minister. This was one of the strategies they learned at Freedom House. They are now in government and they practice that art brutally. I know only too well with my duty free car and the President. He sent me umpteen times to Mr. Nirmal Rekha, though the phone was right next to his hand, it was never touched.
Jagan told me before he died that his government was a power-sharing one. His last public address before he took ill and never recovered was a guest lecture to my fist year political theory class at UG. He is dead and gone and we will never know if, at the level of illusion, he truly believed that the arrangement with the Civic was a power-sharing formula at work but I doubt it very much. Jagan knew it was not, but Jagan could never have worked with other progressive forces after 1992 because of his congenital insecurity complex. Jagan was a highly intelligent man who must have known that what he called the Civic component were people without any thread of political experience and knew nothing about politics and that they had huge landed interests
Four identities I would say were discernible to me under Jagan’s rule from 1992 until his death in 1997. First, there was this subtle reluctance to embark on perestroika and capitalist ventures in Guyana. Jagan was the quintessential communist. He made a convenient covenant with the West to get power in 1992 but he could not at an ideological level bring himself to open up Guyana to both local and foreign investors. The West was watching him, and there were piecemeal concessions, but macro-approaches to capitalist transformation he was certainly not persuasive about.
Three consequences resulted from this resurgent reluctance. One was that privatization moved slower than a sloth. Another was the extreme frustration of local and foreign investors. The deliberate policy of evasion resulted in a huge loss of money by many companies under Dr. Jagan’s tenure. No economist as yet has done a statistical analysis of this loss but it is overdue.
One European company incurred expenditure to the tune of a few dozen millions and just walked away in disgust at the incompetence of then Trade Minister Shree Chand. Mr. Chand once flippantly remarked to me that he didn’t have time for “these capitalists.” Two other ministers still in the cabinet made similar remarks to me. The third consequence was the abrupt end of re-migration by the time of Dr. Jagan’s death. There is this misconception that re-migration was a victim of post-1997 election-related
violence but this is not so. Re-migration dried up under Dr. Jagan himself. By 1995, re-migrants were so fed up with the slowness, evasiveness and incompetence of both the government and the bureaucracy that they took winged impulse again. It will take a phenomenal endeavour by President Jagan to invigorate them to return a second time.
Let’s continue with the three identities. The second was Cheddi Jagan’s realisation that his Freedom House protégés were not immune from sticky fingers. This posed a serious dilemma for Jagan. He earned a reputation as one of politics’ great practitioners devoid of immoral conduct and known for his ethical behaviour in public life. But Jagan was caught in a barb-wired cul-de-sac. Given the fact that all eyes were on his government, given the fact that the expectations of the Guyanese people were stupendous, and given the fact that these were his “children” so to speak, it would have been a tremendous political gamble to expose and ostracize them for wrong-doing. One particular form of explanation that went into this policy was the fear that if these wrong-doers were prosecuted, it would have encouraged criticism of the new government by forces who were opposed to it. And indeed there were mounting criticism from many quarters. We come now to the third identity.
Under Cheddi Jagan, we saw the increasing politicization of the state which had declined under Hoyte. The appointment of Dr. Luncheon as head of the civil service was a reversal of Hoyte’s formula of technocratic faces, in his case, Dr. Tyron Ferguson. Many PPP cadres were filling important civil service jobs like in the Fraud Squad at Customs. It was a fact that many of them couldn’t write properly as this writer came to find out. The last identity was the absolute refusal of the Jagan government to reach out to his former comrades who fought alongside him. The failure to offer the Vice-Chancellor job to Dr. Clive Thomas was perhaps a form of betrayal by Cheddi Jagan
Part 4 – the rebirth of infrastructure and corruption
By the time the 1997 election came around, the country’s physical infrastructure whose rehabilitation began with the Desmond Hoyte’s presidency was in full swing with the PPP government, especially under the ‘workaholic’ president, Bharrat Jagdeo. Many of the improvements that were seen in the first three years of the Cheddi Jagan presidency were in the pipeline during the Hoyte presidency, with the Demerara Harbour Bridge being the most conspicuous
The post 1992 government can be credited with four outstanding achievements. One is debt relief. We don’t know if the Hoyte administration would have got the same terms of relief but most likely any sensible government facing a dire need for reconstruction money after the collapse of the economy under Burnham would have had to adhere to the same conditions as required by the international lending agencies. But there can be no denying that it was a positive accomplishment by the PPP government.
The second major realization was an impressive record of reconstruction. Literally hundreds of schools were renovated and new ones built. Rural electrification became a reality. Leguan saw lights for the first. A programme of rural and urban road development was implemented. The British Government was generous in providing a handsome grant for water improvement both in Georgetown and in the countryside
The third respectable record was the land distribution programme for poor Guyanese to build their own homes. This was an unthinkable omission by the Hoyte government and to date none of his intellectual defenders have explained why Hoyte paid no attention to this aspect of poverty, including even Dr. Tyron Ferguson who has written a well-received account of the transformation of a ruined Guyanese economy to a sustainable one after Hoyte succeeded Burnham.
The fourth laudable policy of the PPP government is the respect for democratic rights. Not even the worst perpetrator of anti-government emotions fears that he/she will be murdered for their political belief. If there is any democratic government, in terms of a ruling party that does not seek to victimize its critics for their compulsive derogation of the government, then Guyana is such a polity. I have lived in other countries and I am quite competent in assessing the affairs of each CARICOM country, and I believe the latitude taken by opposition parties and certain private media houses in this country in the quest to criticize and expose the government has no comparison in the Caribbean. Not even in the US would such latitude be given.
It is outside the scope of this essay to give an enumerated list, but the laws of libel would have been flying around every square inch of territory of the other democratic countries in the hemisphere if what is said in Guyana about the government is said in those countries. One example I believe is important to cite. At a time when policemen were under seize and being killed, no other democratic state would have tolerated talk show hosts inciting violence against police officials.
A discussion on this aspect of PPP rule would be incomplete if one fails to mention too that the government simply does not have the credibility and the societal support in any attempt to confront and prosecute its detractors if it wants to. This is a very vulnerable government given the nature of our political sociology. The state cannot hurt its dissidents and remain unscathed as in other situations in the third world. Whether the ruling party would like to victimise its effective critics because they expose the government for the wrong-doings the government is guilty of we would never know because in Guyana such a policy is impossible to implement. The most the analyst can say is that it does not exist. Speaking from a personal viewpoint, the people who form the government of this country are quite capable of behaving like autocratic Leviathans
It is in the two most spectacular accomplishments of the PPP government, we see the working hands of corrupt forces. In both the land distribution and rehabilitation programmes from 1992 until this moment, a dinosaur of corruption has been devouring the moral image of the PPP government. The Guyana Government is slowly becoming one of the most corrupt in the world, and certainly the most corrupt among the CARICOM family. This writer is not printing what he has heard. I have seen draft with my very eyes and I have evidence of it and I am told of it with increasing frequency by very credible citizens of this land.
If ever there is going to be a situation where the PPP government looks like it will get into irreversible trouble, it will not be over some scandal but over corruption. Since 1992 billions and billions of aid dollars have poured into this country, and those funds have provided a springboard for venal state officials to get rich. Since 1992, state lands have been distributed and it has given rise to perverted transactions. I know a relative of a former world famous cricketer who became wealthy overnight due to her authority in land distribution. Of course she was a close party cadre.
One has to be very naïve to think the possession of wealth by a large percentage of high level party officials could be money sent by their grandmothers from North America. Why wasn’t the money sent before 1992 and why weren’t the Miami-style houses built before then? It is easy to understand questionable financial deals in Guyana among politicians. You just have to look at your own salary, which is higher than ministerial ones yet you cannot afford those houses even if you borrow from the banks. One politician used to work taxis for a living. Two years after joining the government at a very high level, he puts up a house in Eccles like the ones you see in Naples, Florida. Through tender contracts, money goes to the party. The party ran the most expensive election campaign in 2001 in the history of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Where did it come from?
Clive Thomas, writing in his weekly Stabroek News column laments the inaction of the donor countries and international lending agencies over governmental corruption. This is indeed a mystery.
But recently they did dictate to the government to bring legislation to remove the cabinet giving concessions to businessmen and they got a tightening of the procurement process. But surely more needs to be done. If one can locate the failure of the morality, the glory, the dream of 1992, then it is in the culture of corruption in which this government is nicely swimming.
Part 5 Conclusion - Can Guyana be saved?
THE Desmond Hoyte presidency was an exiting moment in Guyanese history but it will also be remembered as a moment of missed opportunity. After he went to the IMF and agreed to open up the Guyanese economy, the walls were closing in on him.
Hoyte knew that the day for rigged election was over under the PNC. But Hoyte underwent a strange psychological change. He became enamoured with his own self-importance and refused to distance himself from the old political culture that had destroyed Guyana.
He dissolved the power-sharing talks the PNC was about to conclude with the PPP in 1985. He saw no value in opening up to the WPA. He scorned constitutional changes. By the time the 1992 election had arrived, Hoyte was so enthralled with his reversals of the Burnhamite blueprint that he laboured under the illusion that he would capture the imagination of the electorate. This was perhaps his worst mistake.
His advisors failed him miserably. Why Mr. Hoyte thought that the Indian people all over the sugar estates would just have ditched the PPP and vote for him remains one of the psychological mysteries of this country.
If Hoyte had overhauled the constitution to reduce the centrality of power, Guyana would not have been in the mess it is in today. Hoyte lost the election in 1992, and all that happened after is that the PPP inherited what the PNC had and has ruled like the PNC in so many areas to the point where one can say Guyana has Burnhamism minus rigged election and one-man rule. Under the PNC, Guyana was to be developed along the lines that ensured the interests of Guyana remained subordinate to the overriding desire of the PNC’s perpetuation of power.
It is in this context the PPP is not almost identical with the PNC but is a replica of the PNC.
Every move, every policy, every little change since 1992 have been done with one single goal in mind – the concretization, consolidation and empowerment of the PPP in the social structure of Guyana. This is the dilemma facing this country. This is where Guyana’s future is threatened. The PPP simply does not have the intellectual resources within its womb to develop this country according to its own perspective. Lacking that endowment, party cadres are placed in authority not to pursue and implement the goals of development but to make sure the PPP stamp is permanently there.
I am not in a position to talk about this in a direct way. My knowledge of the PPP’s domination of Guyana comes from studying the society and not through personal involvement in the affairs of the state. I suppose this goes for all other analysts who write on their own society. But the narrow approach to nationalism with party paramountcy being the central objective is played out before my very eyes at one of the most important institutions in Guyana — the university.
The growth and enhancement of the university take second place to the party’s control of the institution. The PPP must have their guy at the top never mind some genius is waiting to come in and transform the university. Suppose the genius is not a PPP; how then do we retain control of the place? This is the thinking that goes on in the minds of Freedom House mandarins.
Thus the leadership of UG must remain attached to the party even though the university suffers through this kind of ossified, anti-developmental domination. Simply take what is happening at UG and transport it to Guyana itself, then, the question mark over the future of Guyana appears boldly in front of your eyes to see
No discussion on the future of Guyana can be meaningful if the other important forces are not situated within the proper context. Here is where the PNC is as outdated as the PPP. What can we expect of the alternative to the PPP when that alternative is as anti-patriotic and power-obsessed as the ruling regime? What kind of future can the post-Hoyte PNC bring to this country when you look at its composition? Here is a party that offers itself as the future but its forces are politically ancient and politically questionable.
Is the PNC asking the Guyanese electorate to elect it in 2006, making Mr. Corbin the president and to have some of the faces who worked with Burnham and who helped to destroy Guyana, back in power? My own personal view is that the PNC showed it had not changed even an inch when some of the experienced Burnhamite cadres undermined Winston Murray’s manoeuvres for the position of chairman. Out of respect for professional media ethics, I say no more on this.
The suspicion Raphael Trotman lives with in the PNC is a large indication that the party does not want new leadership. The election of Robert Corbin was an unashamed announcement to the Guyanese people that the PNC will be the PNC and that Guyana is second to the PNC. How can any analyst interpret it any other way? I hold no personal opinion against Mr. Corbin.
As an academic who study and write on Guyana’s social structure and its politics, I find the PNC’s embrace of its old personnel (old in terms of the era or the time) in the leadership as a signal that the party is not prepared to put Guyana first. It is my heart-felt view that Mr. Corbin will not attract cross racial voting. If President Jagdeo cannot do that, then by what logic can Corbin do it? But back to the rule of the PPP.
It has been twelve years of the continuation of an outdated political culture under the PPP. What shiny, new motifs we see on the physical landscape of this country are due to the unlimited pouring in of loans and grants by the international community and the economic bravery of the private sector. It is not an easy country to invest in, and the future of this country is always being questioned. Yet the private sector persists and for this reason, they have won the admiration of the entire population. Take the private sector away, and this country becomes a ghost town.
So what does the future hold? I would think the future is dependent on a number of solutions. First, the PPP must embrace a new political culture and totally abandon the Burnhamite methodology they have been so happy to embrace after 1992. Secondly, there must be a closer working relation between the ruling party and the opposition with constitutional and parliamentary institutions being empowered and respected.
Thirdly, the wider society has to stop taking sides and have a more independent vision. Fourthly, Jimmy Carter has to get the ruling party to understand that party domination in Guyana must give way to a new vision
END OF SERIES