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The decision by the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government not to have normal democratic communications with the elected representatives of the Opposition is the most egregious insult to the African people in Guyana in the post-independence period and arguably since slavery. Humans are political animals who in modern times express themselves best in a representative democratic setting and to deny them that is in effect to denude them of their political freedom and humanity.
To make matters worse, both the PPP and the People’s National Congress (PNC) – the dominant Opposition group – are essentially ethnic parties that get more than 90% of their support from Indians and Africans respectively. Therefore, for any group to reject the democratic representatives of the other is apartheid: the implementation and maintenance of a system of government in which one racial group is deprived of its most fundamental political right. Make no mistake, the PPP is not refusing to have normal communications with the Opposition because it accused the PPP of rigging the 2020 elections: this is allowed by democratic jurisprudence. The real intent of the PPP is to force Africans to make their political representations through the PPP and/or organisations controlled by or sympathetic to it, and that is tantamount to seeking to establish an apartheid state in Guyana.
Therefore, even before the aircraft taking the delegation to the recent Guyanese diaspora conference in Washington lifted off from Cheddi Jagan International Airport, the trip was already a success for the Guyanese people and specifically for the Opposition and a disaster for the PPP. It would be shocking if the senior world power in whose backyard Guyana is located and in which a substantial number of Guyanese live and traverse on a daily basis needed to invite the Opposition to know what is taking place here!
The major objective of the invitation was to send a clear message to the PPP and the Guyanese people that the Opposition and other social organisations such as trade unions are vital elements of the democratic process. But the PPP proceeded to make matters worse for itself: whether or not it deliberately intended to prevent MP David Patterson from attending the conference, the regime’s intention was to embarrass him when a suitable opportunity arose and thus even before the participants arrived in Washington, the PPP had exposed to the world its despotic nature that it is paying millions out of the public coffers to refute!
Partly to detract from the conference and the self-inflicted disaster, the PPP cobbled together a propaganda onslaught that even in these dire times is too hilarious to be ignored. One propagandist concluded that ‘No matter what Mr. Jeffries does he cannot sanitize the PNC which has an indelible stain as election riggers (‘Mr Jeffries should be mindful of the company he keeps,’ SN: 27/09/2023)! This letter could not have possibly, as purported, been directed to the Leader of the Democratic Party in the United States House of Representatives and must have been intended to mollify PPP supporters who have been indoctrinated with this bilge. Even if he did not request it, once Mr. Hakeem Jeffries began to dabble in Guyana’s affairs he would have been invited to briefings, oral and/or written, rooted in an historical memory that is longer and more substantial than that to which most of us have any access.
Indeed, on the issue of elections rigging and majority rule, if he was not already aware, among other things, Jeffries would have been reminded that the PPP intended to use the ethnic majority it has cultivated in Guyana to join the dictatorial and brutal Stalinist Soviet block whose objective was to put an end to liberal democracy, and that could not have been allowed to happen. After failing to get the PPP to work with the PNC, it was expected that the United Force, the PNC’s coalition partner, would have been able to curtail the ambitions of Forbes Burnham, whom was also suspected to be some kind of a Titoite socialist (self-management socialists then propagated by President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia).
Burnham fathomed that the manipulation of elections to keep the communist PPP from government was far more important to the West than elections manipulation and the rest is history. To indicate how seriously the United States and its allies took the Jagan threat, the briefing might have indicated that one month after the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world the closest as it has ever been to nuclear holocaust, in November 1962 Venezuela, at the United Nations, officially rekindled the border dispute as a backstop to the arrangements the West already had in Guyana with the PNC, United Force, the church and others to prevent Jagan from coming to government. In passing, Cheddi Jagan and, of all people, Hugo Chavez believed this to be so!
I am not quarrelling with the Jagans’ communist belief: we all have our beliefs but if one’s belief poses a danger to what is foundational to others they will contest and seek to defeat it. Communism was finally defeated with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and less than five years later, with the help of the US and the West, the PNC was gone from government in Guyana. But the latent disruptive ethnic/racial expressions; the structural fissures of a bicommunal ethnic society that PNC rule suppressed for nearly three decades, almost immediately came to the fore.
This history is troublesome for a PPP indoctrinated in notions of its moral political superiority, so, absurd as it is, it does appear that some of its propagandists want to abandon history altogether and are recommending that one should pay attention only to the views of those who have little actual experience of the PPP’s extensive misrule. ‘It is not easy for a Guyanese born before the turn of the millennium to be objective in the context of race in relation to politics in Guyana. Thus, it is my opinion that any Guyanese person over 23 years of age will struggle to be objective in that context’ (‘One Guyana is on! Let us make it happen,’ SN: 04/10/2023)!
More important than factual accounts, the Washington visit was also intended to capture how a strategic group of parliamentarians interpret what is taking place in Guyana and to provide an indication of their view of its future. But apart from some specific electoral issues, it is precisely here that broad talk about democracy, inclusiveness, equitability, etc that one has been hearing will not suffice. Notwithstanding all the political difficulties and accusations of ethnic discrimination, etc., the Opposition political elite continue to speak and act in the archaic, assimilationist, generalised, non-ethnic terms of the PPP. For example, ‘we have been doing a great deal for small businesses’ with no effort to specifically scientifically demonstrate how this affects, Indians, Africans, or Amerindians!
This refusal to give greater priority to the ethnic political divide in Guyana is a mistake, for it does not prevent one from trying to become an actual multiethnic party; rather than pretending to be one. Indeed, what it might help to do is to weed out the racists/opportunists from the ranks. The current approach gives wide scope for any ethnic driven political party to surreptitiously pursue discriminatory policies. This is the reason why a PPP set upon ethnic dominance continues to speak in broad terms and refuses to conduct as others, including the British albeit in perhaps a less demanding situation, have done, an ethnic disparity study to establish if, even unintentionally, ethnic discrimination has taken place and what measures are necessary to rectify the situation.