When Mr. Desmond Hoyte finally accepted the concept of “Shared Governance” for Guyana , not too long before his death, I commented that it was a “historic” occasion. Mr. Hoyte disagreed publicly with the assessment: I am not sure if because of modesty or because of the rationales proffered. One rationale was that the PNC was conceding that the voting patterns in Guyana was so fixed that they did not see their “national” party securing the Presidency on its own. Since the fixity of voting in Guyana played out itself along ethnic lines, and the majority of the PNC's votes came from the African Guyanese community, this meant, to me, that the PNC had given up on any heavy cross-ethnic voting, and was bargaining on behalf of its constituency for inclusion in the Executive power structure of the State. I mean, if there were the possibility of substantial cross-ethnic voting, then there would be no basis for shared governance; parties would be voted in and out of office based on their stand on the issues.

Mr. Hoyte balked at our stark formulation- which we thought flowed from the logic of the situation - that if there was to be any credibility in the PNC's claim for shared governance, it would have to accept that it was bargaining on behalf of African Guyanese. The PNC, like the PPP, however, refused give up its insistence that it was a “national” party – which up to now, in our context, means that they have to pretend that they had support from all the various constituencies. The PPP could get away with this fiction because of its larger Indian base, which did not need so many cross-over votes to tilt the scales in its favour electorally. The two major parties do not want the tag “ethnic parties”. For the PNC, however, we felt that its stance presented itself with a quandary: how would they credibly tell their supporters they could win general elections when their calls for “power sharing” implied otherwise? Why share when you could win?

The PNC's predicament stemmed from its insistence that the Shared Governance model was being proposed for the “national” good. Maybe the concept was for the national good, but in skirting around the issue as to why it was being offered, the PNC did not force the issue to be framed so that the real fears of its constituency could be placed on the national agenda. This was, and remains, due to the belief that if one articulated “ethnic interests” then one had to ineluctably take particularistic and partisan positions. The reality is that it does not have to be so; and ironically, if the parties were to accept that their support bases are basically from different and separate ethnic constituencies, then shared governance would logically follow. No government that accepted its ethnic base could claim that it had a “national” following so as to exclude the representatives of a large segment of the population.

The successor to Mr. Hoyte, Mr. Robert Corbin, continued with Mr. Hoyte's articulation for shared governance, with all its contradictions. It was not that Mr. Corbin did not understand those contradictions, but it appears that institutional forces from within and without the PNC cannot bear the thought that the PNC may be tagged as “a black man's party”. So it went into another election as a “national” party, and inevitably lost.

There are some who attribute the PNC's loss to the AFC, but while the AFC took the overwhelming percentage of their votes from the PNC, if one were to add their votes to the PNC's we would be right back to the old percentage of the PNC's. The fraction of the AFC's Indian support would be counterbalanced by the number of Africans who stayed away from the polls for a variety of reasons. The AFC has adopted the same “national” line as the PPP and the PNC – in refusing to accept that ethnic interests do not have to necessarily contradict the “national” interest. Isn't the national interest, after all, the sum of all the variety of interests – economic, social, religious, gender, class, geographic, occupational – and yes, ethnic?

After the last elections, Mr. Corbin was much more forthright in his assessment as to what interests the PNC had to stand up for, but at the end of one call-in program, he unfortunately floundered as he refused to state forthrightly that ethnic interests are not ipso facto against “national” interests. There has been a flurry of activity in the African Guyanese community as to how best their interests can be articulated, and this can be seen as their struggle for more effective leadership. In a certain sense, the “splitting” of the PNC vote by the AFC may represent a resurgence of the Coloured-African split that had been papered over by Mr. Forbes Burnham when his PNC merged with, and absorbed, the United Democratic Party in 1958.

While there is much that we may differ with in some of the analyses and claims emanating from the African Guyanese activists, what is notable in the ongoing discourse is their insistence on “shared governance.” During the five years when I sat as a member of the Opposition, I discovered that there is a significant bloc within the PNC who are committed to sharing power in real terms. I was surprised, and gratified, when one individual – high up in the hierarchy – confided that it would not be in Guyana 's interest for the PNC to take over the reins of Government on its own. It is important that this call has gained wider currency.