Money, power and race

First, the deadly covid19: follow instructions. Make sacrifice, big or small. Life and death emergency.

Now Guyana. Its troubled March 2 elections illustrate how proportional representation can work in a multi-racial democratic society but contaminated by the political ambitions of men. Guyana always faced election sickness.

After the controversial results of the May 11, 2015 Guyana elections, the Carter Centre Observer Team recommended: “The process for the counting, tabulation and transmission of results should be carefully revised to improve transparency with attention to the relationship between tabulation by returning officers and the central tally. Use a centralised electronic system.” These 2015 recommendations were not implemented.

Representatives from Caricom, OAS, US, UK and the European Union have all expressed deep concerns over the counting and management of the March 2 results. The legitimacy of any David Granger APNU/APC government is threatened. He should prevent this. The current crisis started in December 2018 when Parliament collapsed after one APNU/AFC member, Charrandas Persaud, said “yes” to the Opposition (33-32) no confidence motion.

Parliament went into a crazed uproar, hands waving and Persaud being pushed and shouted down to say “no.” Power was at its highest stake. The Speaker appeared shocked and confused, starting the voting again. Persaud declared: “My conscience is now clear.” Elections were constitutionally due March 2019.

Between 1953 and 1961, Guyana’s leaders were frustrated by the British government, mainly for PPP leader Cheddi Jagan’s socialist leanings. From first-past-the-post PPP victories in 1953, 1957 and 1961 to the British-US inspired proportional representation system in 1964, racial voting dominated the results.

Times were rough for Jagan and Guyana politics. In 1954, he was jailed for breaking his curfew. At the trial, in Mandelian style, Jagan declared: “Today Guiana is a vast prison. Whether I am inside or outside matters little. I expect no justice from this or any other court. Justice has been dead since the British troops landed.”

After 1966 independence, in 2011, the PPP/C won the presidency but lost by one seat (32 to 33) in parliament. In the controversial 2015 election the APNU/AFC won the presidency and scraped through with one seat victory (33 to 32) in parliament. Granger’s alliance got 50.3 per cent of the votes, Bharrat Jagdeo’s PPP/C got 49.2 per cent. Such narrow party victories resting on racial insecurities make the grab for power a life or death pursuit.

Guyana’s racial polarisation became entrenched by the 1955 PPP split. Forbes Burnham left, then allowed by Britain to form his PNC government with Shridath Ramphal as Attorney General. On Burnham’s departure, the Carter Centre concluded: “Leadership ambitions and political calculations split the PPP into ethnic factors with Burnham heading the PNC and Jagan the PPP.”

In the evolution of western democracy, the argument was repeatedly made by political philosophers that the state, a government, was necessary to “tame the natural instincts of man,” such as the individual’s “perpetual, restless desire for power after power that easeth only in death.”

An elected government with restraining powers was thought necessary to tame such anarchic ambitions and protect one person from the selfish interests of others. Thomas Hobbes added that without such a government, “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Little did he and others like him expect that the government they thought of would also become as “nasty, brutish and corrupt” today. It is now the citizens who often have to protect themselves from the greedy ambitions of politicians in government. The general breakdown of trust in politicians was apparently not considered by these early political philosophers.

Edmund Burke for instance, argued that elected MPs should represent their own views, have “unbiased opinions, mature judgments and an enlightened conscience,” not the interests of their constituents. How many such politicians are there? And what about when they seek re-election?

All this point to today’s decline of political parties, at least moral decline. If in hard times, there is muscular, subversive struggles for political power, how much more will it be when money comes awash? Guyana faces the toxic mixture of money, power and racial antagonisms. What would it profit a country to gain oil wealth and suffer the loss of its international reputation?