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The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has now cloaked its decades-long attempt to establish political/ethnic domination in Guyana under a ‘One Guyana’ banner that it claims is intended to end racism. However, instead of focusing on the actual discriminatory practices that persons have been complaining about, by way of all manner of highly questionable arrangements that bypass the normal institutions of the state:, 6,000 GOAL scholarships, 1000 Men On Mission initiatives, etc, it has been directly accumulating state power in an attempt to bribe, cajole and otherwise try to miniaturise its political/ethnic competitors.
This intention of the PPP is not new: it is merely a ‘new’ label, and after its 2015 electoral loss, a more brazen and all-embracing approach. In ‘Furtive establishment of political dominance’ (SN: 17th April 2013) I noted that ‘the desire to place a greater African membership under the existent PPP leadership may also explain why there is not a single area in African social life that the PPP has not sought to dominate or depress. Just look around: Linden, the Georgetown City Council, the TUC and Public Service Union, the University of Guyana and even the church. Africans who wish to progress must join the PPP. … The idea then is to corral the impoverished Africans and herd them into the PPP.’
Firstly, race and racism differ greatly in their social significance. The identification of social groups by distinct physical or cultural characteristics has existed until the modern period without leading to racism. Race and ethnicity are social constructions that artificially divide people into distinct groups based on characteristics such as physical appearance, ancestral heritage, cultural affiliation, cultural history, values, behavioral patterns, language, political and economic interests, history, and ancestral location. Racism is the systemic subordination and discrimination against members of one racial/ethnic group which has relatively less social power by the members of another group. ‘An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle ages’(https://www.pbs.org/
The old attempt to assimilate everyone in some dominant culture is long gone and today the growing influence of ethnic identity and potential for ethnic conflict in homogeneous societies has resulted in multiculturalism wherein different races, ethnicities, cultures, etc, co-exist in harmony and types of an electoral system, methods of positive discrimination and special ethnic institutions are established and consistently monitored.
If the PPP had any intention of dealing with racism, it would as any modern responsible government would do, attempt to adopt the approaches just mentioned to try and quell the decades -long ethnic political problem. And given the widespread belief that it is discriminating, an inclusively managed ethnic disparity audit of its 25 years in government would certainly be more helpful than its present autocratic approach.
The PPP is more interested in the political demise of the People’s National Congress (PNC), its ethnic political rival, but I am not aware of any national laws that prevent the formal or informal existence of ethnic political parties, and the United Nations 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities states that ‘Persons belonging to minorities have the right to establish and maintain their own associations.’ Furthermore, ‘States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity and states shall adopt appropriate legislative and other measures to achieve those ends. Persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, and to use their own language, in private and in public, freely and without interference or any form of discrimination.’
As I argued last week, contrary to this Declaration, today a mainly ethnic political party – the PPP – that receives more than 90% of its votes from those of Indian ethnicity, comes to government and is refusing to allow the opposition PNC, which receives a similar proportion of votes from those of African ethnicity, the constitutional space to effectively function at the national or local political levels of government. In other words, the PPP wants us to believe that it could end racism by adopting the racist approach that takes away the constitutional political rights of another ethnic group!
Much of the political problem in Guyana is located in a form of political self-deception that largely prevents the opposition from maximally confronting the PPP. Its major elements are Guyana’s majoritarian political heritage, the numerical size and closeness of the ethnic constituencies of the two major competitors, the institutionalisation of elections manipulation and in this context the struggle for ‘cross over’ votes.
Both the PPP and its main competitor, the PNC claim that since persons of all races can join their parties they are not racist parties. But as indicated above, parties can legitimately represent an ethnic group without being racist and who holds power in an organisation and from which sections of the population a party gets most of its vote is a better barometer of the nature of a political party than who can join.
To be effectively politically represented, any ethnic group must devise, articulate and win such support as it can on the basis of policies that are universally morally just. The Apartheid struggle in South Africa had members/supporters of various ethnicities at all levels in the organisation because it was fighting a just cause. In Guyana, largely because of this political self-deception, apparently there is the silliness of persons who are ethnic minorities in a party claiming that they are in that party to represent the interest of their ethnic group and the interest of the wider membership of the party of which they are a member is secondary!
