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In his New Year message, President Irfaan Ali claimed that ‘The future of Guyana is bright and promising. We have set Guyana on a course of sustained growth and prosperity. The New Year – 2024, will see us advance more rapidly along this path as we shape the destiny of present and future generations. This caused me to wonder if he is deluding himself or clearly understands what his prognosis entails for the present trajectory of Guyana’s development.
Future generations do have a right to benefit from present-day resource extractions, and according to the experts, resource-rich democratic countries usually have good opportunities to become sustainably prosperous for present and future generations. However, this is not the automatic result of spending large inflows of money on more and more projects. It requires generational thinking and transformational planning, coordination and oversight of the development process. When one can wake up and find that US$214m of the people’s resources almost miraculously turned into US$3m or children have lost their lives in fire in a school dorm under regime control and no one appears certain who was responsible to keep them safe, who will believe that we are even close to an era of ‘transformational planning, coordination, and oversight’? Generational thinking is as much, if not more, about building appropriate institutions than physical infrastructure, and both should be built in such a manner as to facilitate development long into the future.
Successful long-term development depends upon consistent economic decisions being made repeatedly over decades, so, the laws, rules and guidelines must be consistently followed over a long time. There must be sustained policy consensus, and the transformation strategy must be robust even with government changes. This means that transformational planning must be inclusive, open and participatory. Decision-makers should incorporate the inputs of other stakeholders – government departments, parliament, citizens directly affected by extraction, civil society, the extractive companies, and private sector, etc. But it is claimed that the ‘magic ingredient’ – the real power that defends the rules and ensures that they are updated and enforced – ‘is the existence of a critical mass of citizens who understand that the rules must be kept and are willing to use what authority they must ensure that they are kept. As guardians of the strategy these citizens play a scrutinizing role by holding decision-makers to account’ (https://resourcegovernance. org/approach/ natural-resource-charter).
President Ali’s government proports to be democratic but it has largely dismissed the official opposition and is seeking to control all levers of power in society. It claims that its programmatic authority comes from its party manifesto, but in a democracy the party’s manifesto is not paramount: it is only one important input in the policy making process. The government mandate is to properly manage the entire nation, not only to adhere to the wishes of those who voted for it! Is this the kind of inclusive, open, and participatory environment that transformational generational planning requires? If so, where will we find that ‘critical mass of citizens who … play a scrutinizing role by holding decision-makers to account’?
But those who follow this column must already have realized that the above discourse is misdirected, for did I not last week claim that Guyana is not a liberal democracy, and according to the V-Dem index, which is considered by some ‘the most important provider of quantitative democracy data for scholarly research’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Dem_Democracy_Indices), it is an ‘electoral democracy’ verging on upon being an electoral autocracy, i.e., close to becoming a dictatorship that merely hold elections to lay claim to democratic credentials.
Make no mistake, dictatorships can foster ‘economic’ development and Singapore is a good example, but a dictatorship on this continent today would be unacceptable and that apart, will face other insurmountable obstacles in Guyana. Lest it be thought that I am exaggerating let us first consider the table below.
While describing all aspects of government, the V-Dem’s approach focuses on regime quality by way of various indices: electoral democracy (ED) that deals with the principle of representative democracy, e.g., free and fair elections, free and independent media, is a central feature of all the other indices, liberal democracy (LD); the rule of law, checks and balances, civil liberties along, etc.; participatory democracy (PD), namely the degree to which citizens participate in government through local democratic institutions, civil society organizations, direct democracy, etc.; deliberative democracy (DD) in which decisions are made in the best interest of the people as opposed to due to coercion or narrow interest groups, and egalitarian democracy (EgD), which measures the level of equal access to resources, power, and freedoms across various groups within a society.
V-Dem Democracy Indices 2023
Country | Rate | ED | LD | PD | DD | EgD |
Denmark | 1 | 0.916 | 0.889 | 0.702 | 0.877 | 0.878 |
Jamaica | 33 | 0.797 | 0.695 | 0.529 | 0.678 | 0.659 |
Trinidad &Tobago | 36 | 0.784 | 0.666 | 0.503 | 0.713 | 0.692 |
Barbados | 39 | 0.782 | 0.666 | 0.331 | 0.687 | 0.651 |
Suriname | 42 | 0.770 | 0.653 | 0.498 | 0.606 | 0.579 |
Guyana | 84 | 0.535 | 0.365 | 0.312 | 0.260 | 0.380 |
Singapore | 103 | 0.425 | 0.339 | 0.121 | 0.356 | 0.361 |
Remember last week I argued that Dr. Vishu Bisram’s recommendation that Guyana should follow the development pathway of Singapore would only drive Guyana further into the democratic abyss! Please note where and how the other Caricom countries are clustered, where Guyana is and that by every indicator Guyana is well behind its CARICOM partners. Indeed, this suggests that in terms of governance and possibly a range of other issues, any comparison will most likely be with unlike things and the implications of this are substantial.
The Singapore government has overcome the inclusive nature of the democratic policy continuity requirement by having had the same family in control of the government since 1959. This kind of governmental longevity is undoubtedly attractive to the PPP, but from the development standpoint it has an even more obstinate hurdle with which to deal. Singapore is a dominant ethnic state where the 74% Chinese majority has historically supported the ruling party. Guyana is a bicommunal multiethnic society in which two ethnic groups of almost equally size control over 80% of the voting population and have been fighting for political supremacy longer than Singapore existed (1965) as a nation state!
Societies such as Guyana do not have that critical mass of citizens willing to hold decision-makers to account. The next best democratic instrument is what the PPP abhors: inclusiveness and power-sharing becomes inevitable because of the logic of political cleavage even in electoral democracies.
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