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In 1274 BC Pharaoh of Egypt Rameses II set out to capture the strategic Hittite city of Kadesh in western Syria. On his way, he captured a few Hittite spies who fed him false information and the impetuous Pharaoh, leaving some of his army behind, moved ahead with 20,000 infantry and 2,000 chariots and ran headlong into the Hittite’s 40,000 infantry and 3,000 chariots, suffering a serious mauling in what was one of the largest chariots wars the world has known. The Hittites, believing they had won, let their guard down, began to plunder and were set upon by the advancing Egyptian main army. Perhaps the world’s earliest known peace treaty was signed, but the Pharaoh, after the loss of so many lives and other resources, was not politically comfortable about returning home empty handed and so initiated perhaps the first large scale military propaganda campaign. He had proclamations and celebrations of his victory posted throughout the land.
Two groups of people, the oligarchs at Freedom House and the Aubrey Norton naysayers, the former more so than the latter, are not too pleased with the outcome of the recent local government elections (LGE). Rameses came to mind when I heard the general secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Bharrat Jagdeo claiming a landslide victory for his party at the LGE. In the formal sense it is a victory but like Rameses’ an empty one! The main purpose the PPP oligarchy plundered the public purse and marched its troops out of Freedom House was to impress and win every significant African Village along the way to Georgetown. Its campaign was a failure.
The PPP has never valued local democracy: it is an ideologically centralist party. It did not hold local government elections for about two decades of its previous 23 years in government. It has destroyed even the paltry degree of the separation of powers from the Westminster political system affords. It has de facto control over the Local Government Commission and the appointment of the Regional Executive Officers, etc. There are numerous debilitating central government requirements with which local populations must comply. The PPP also has a penchant – which was in full flow during LGE – for walking into local areas and willy-nilly distributing public funds to its supporters for work best left to the local authorities. Indeed, as the Mahdia tragedy and the responses to it demonstrate, it is nonsense to speak seriously about the existence of democratic political devolution in Guyana.
However, from the day it took government in 2020 it was told in no uncertain terms by the United States government that the present winner-takes-all political system does not work. In other words, it does not matter how the two large political parties in Guyana perceive themselves: as the LGE has again demonstrated, they are fundamentally ethnic parties. The PPP understands this and its decades-long drive for political/ethnic dominance is rooted in this realisation. However, when it pretended not to understand the message, the leading oligarchs were ‘invited’ to headquarters in Washington and among other pressing things, were reminded of the need to end the winner-takes-all system in the interest of across-the-board equity and inclusion.
Like Rameses set upon Kadesh, dogmatically pursuing its dominating course, the main objective of the PPP when it marched its troops out of Freedom House was to capture the main local centers of African political power to demonstrate that it is a genuine multiethnic party with a mandate to rule Guyana. But even before the elections the undemocratic way it went about achieving its goal negated it! The PNC went reluctantly to the local elections to stop the PPP; to prevent its traditional strongholds from being taken over by the Freedom House oligarchs. The elections then were in essence a battle for the African political heartlands. Norton played the ground game he knows well and even with a disjointed party stymied the PPP’s advance.
The second group referred to above consists mainly of some aging ‘middle class’ African APNU+AFC supporters who think that Norton’s grass roots, African-orientated style makes him unelectable. They find it difficult to reconcile the fact that he won an open free and fair leadership election. The present threat to the PNC traditional constituents is bigger than their perceptions about Norton and the requirement of the moment dictates that instead of standing by and letting him fall to make a point they should be pooling their considerable talents to make less perilous their perceived deficiencies. It appears that former president David Granger, came to realise that if Norton did fall, much of the blame for fostering the present divide would be on his head, hence his belated contribution to the hustings! Norton did not fall but must seek to be more inclusive and cooperative.
Perhaps nudged somewhat, Freedom House is now suing for peace and so we are told that matters not its loss, it has a plan and intends to develop Georgetown! This begs the question as to what this plan is and why it was not implemented before. I think we have a good idea why it was not implemented and must hope that the PPP has learnt the lessons of this elections encounter and not try to impose another of its suffocating undemocratic constructs.
One would have thought that at local elections that do not involve a change in central government people would have been more open to the PPP’s ‘gifts’ (It is rumored it is now taking back some!), but the legendary African pride of which the slavers spoke was again triumphant. Ironically, its many red shirt parades only added fuel to the fire and helped to mobilize PNC supporters nationally and internationally. Like the naysayers, the oligarchs badly miscalculated: they placed too much faith in self-interest and money and thus were effectively defeated by Aubrey Norton at the head of a divided and fractious PNC. Who knows what could be achieved if it was united!
Two closing point: firstly, one hopes this defeat of the PPP will send a clear message to the African-orientated PNC. If with all it has done, the PPP could not make a significant breakthrough with Africans, the most politically liberal and open ethnic group of people in the entire Caribbean, the PNC does not stand a ghost of a chance of doing so with Indians. The advice given to the PPP regarding the nature of the political system is, therefore, as relevant to the PNC. As Sir Arthur Lewis stated, democracy in our context cannot be one ethnic group, (usually in our case with some marginal win) having the authority to make all the important decisions and having total control of the country’s finances.
Secondly, Africans should not and do not have to wait for a political solution to end to the PPP’s structural discrimination and ensure their social, economic, and financial liberation. Properly crafted and pursued, the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent, which calls upon all countries to collect disaggregated data based on race, gender, age, geographic location, employment, and economic status on peoples of African descent to identify, monitor and track disparities and hold governments accountable for their human rights condition, provides an immediate liberating opportunity.