The country’s experience with majoritarian democracy has not been good. One telling sign of this is that over the two decades the PPP were in office its autocratic behaviour and the depth of inefficiency and corruption became legendary.
Indeed, notwithstanding its having fairly ‘won’ every national election between 1992 and 2006, many believe that by 2011 a credible case could have been made that the PPP was worse than the PNC had been.
Yet, by the end of 2011, it appeared that the PPP and its government were unstoppable: it had more or less successfully taken Guyana into a state of political dominance and its leadership was euphoric.
For a country in which two major racial/ethnic groups have been struggling for political power since even before the British colonialists left its shores, ethnic dominance is pervasive: it touches all areas of social life.
It is useless to attempt to establish efficient national institutions in conditions of dominance.
The most likely outcome will be the development of a culture of abuse in which loyalty to the regime trumps respect for the people.
Yet all we are being provided with by the successors of Cheddi Jagan is the highly utopian and forlorn hope that someday we will come to live cooperatively together under the dominance of the PPP.
Guyana is a democracy only in the sense that it holds regular elections: all the other political virtues are missing and now the PPP, in order to maintain its domination, is involved in elections manipulation.
Sir Arthur Lewis (Politics in West Africa. 1965), is recognized to have made a seminal point about democracy.
‘The most important requirement of democracy is that citizens have the opportunity to participate, directly or indirectly, in decision-making.
This meaning of democracy is violated if significant minorities are excluded from the decision-making process for extended periods of time.
Under such circumstances, narrow majority rule is ‘totally immoral, inconsistent with the primary meaning of democracy and destructive of any prospect of building a nation in which different people might live together in harmony.’
Many reputable governments and organisations, the latest being the US government, have over the years encouraged Guyana to reform the winner-takes-all political system and it is time to try something new.
However, typical of countries such as Guyana, in which elite opinion is paramount, there was and is still much misguided ideological and self-interested resistance.
Largely due to this ideological myopia and unnecessary hubris, the opportunities opened by the 2011 and 2015 elections were again missed.
APNU+AFC came to government in 2015 with a promise to reverse the trend towards ethnic dominance and set Guyana on a more inclusive and democratic pathway, but lo and behold, it failed to make any serious effort to deliver on that promise.
Aware of the uncertain nature of competitive politics, on many occasions I reminded the coalition that the PPP was set upon a dangerous course. I even sought the aid of the bible to warn that there would be ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ if the PPP was returned to government.
