The value of electoral competition
Freddie Kissoon Column
Kaieteur News
December 4, 2006
If the AFC gets a sixth seat and CN Sharma is awarded one, the implication would be enormous. I am yet to see the statistics of each polling station as normally put out by GECOM after each general election.
This document is a gargantuan goldmine for analysts, the reason being that it can tell you if there are changing patterns of voting. It will also reveal how hardened are the voting habits of each ethnic group.
There seems to be three types of changes that the GECOM results have shown so far. I would urge readers to be careful in embracing this assessment of mine because it can only be foolproof if I have a breakdown of how the votes went at each polling station.
This needs further explanation. Let's take the Alliance for Change (AFC). On the surface it would appear that the AFC was welcomed by African-Guyanese but was unable to convert meaningful number of East Indians.
The AFC picked up the bulk of its support from Region Four. But Region Four is home to a substantial number of East Indians.
I dealt with this analysis before so I am not going to elaborate. My point was that if in Georgetown in Kingston , Kitty, Queenstown, the AFC did well, then it got young East Indian votes.
If in Region Four, the AFC pulled its votes mostly from Plaisance, Ann's Grove, Golden Grove among other villagers, then, it would appear that African Guyanese gravitated to the AFC and not East Indians.
Let's return to the three changes I mentioned above. First, the critics that say that third parties in the West Indies cannot undermine the entrenched power of the two party system have been proven wrong.
The Alliance for Change has picked up five seats (or maybe six seats if their claim proves correct) within the space of nine months in existence. It is a phenomenal achievement.
The AFC was born in October 2004. From thereon, it hardly did any type of extensive organising. For example, I live in Wortmanville. The AFC hardly showed its presence there.
I work at UG, and the AFC's organisers were not entirely visible there. This is not to say that the AFC did not have its groundings with the Guyanese people. But in that short space of time, such limited experience would hardly give a political party six seats.
The complete picture from GECOM is yet to come, but it would not be off-target to say that the results of the 2006 elections showed that more than nine percent of the electorate rejected the two-party scenario.
The second development relates to the Amerindians. If the Amerindians had rejected the PPP, it would have lost the elections.
The PPP in this sense can boast of cross-racial voting. For cross-racial voting to be positive in this country however, there has to be Africans defecting to the PPP and East Indians in massive numbers dumping the PPP. This has not happened but there has been a start.
This brings us to the third factor. The AFC's six seats, the one seat for ROAR and maybe the left-over votes that may go to CN Sharma, are large indicators that a gradual breakthrough in the traditional attitude of voting has begun. In no other dimension is this perceptible change more visible than in the diminution of the PNC's parliamentary showing. It lost five seats.
The consequences of this we have to wait to see but my belief is that this loss has diminished the power in the PNC's advocacy for shared governance.
Let me state unambiguously; shared governance in which the PNC and other opposition groups are embraced in a nationalist desire by the PPP can only be for the good of this country.
The sooner it happens, the better.
But what we, the advocates of shared governance, must never cast out of our minds is that a party's claim to the distribution of power must always be encapsulated in the framework of electoral competition.
Before the elections in August, ACDA had recommended joint government. After the poll, Eric Phillips has now announced the exigency of shared governance with the PNC, PPP and others. But Phillips thinks he is smart.
Of course he has a right to think like that. The same goes for Ogunseye.
Both Phillips and Ogunseye have renewed their energy in the direction of joint government. But they had to framework it. What was the theoretical canopy they used?
First let's deal with ACDA's proclamation. Had there been all-party government before the August poll, then, the new government would not have reflected the will of the people.
The PNC would have been in the Cabinet and not the AFC. After all, observers would have said that the PNC is the main opposition and must be included. The AFC would have been locked out because it did not exist as a parliamentary entity before August 2006.
Herein lies the value of electoral competition. Let's now return to Phillips and Ogunseye.
If you continue the call for power-sharing between the PPP and PNC, then your position is somewhat weakened because after all, the PNC lost five seats.
What Ogunseye and Phillips have done is to argue that it wasn't the fault of the PNC that they lost five seats. It was the system that was inherently geared against the PNC.
Phillips and Ogunseye came up with a package of excuses. Here they are: (1) the independent press hurt the electoral chances of the PNC. (2) the AFC was created to undermine the electoral guarantees of the PNC. (3) the PPP used its incumbency to its advantage.
Nowhere did Ogunseye and Phillips argue that in the free poll in August 2006, the PPP did well, the AFC did well, the TUF retained its seat, ROAR still got a seat in conjunction with GAP but it was the PNC that lost five seats. And why?
Because people may have lost interest in what the PNC is doing and what it stands for.
In judging a party's character then, you must look at its electoral strength.