In politics, opportunities and pretexts to betray your constituency, your party or the Constitution will often arise. It is a historical fact that the major political parties – People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and People’s National Congress (PNC) – have practised the dark arts of deception and defection for decades. The Alliance For Change, most notoriously, was founded in 2005 by three members of parliament who belonged to other parties. Political betrayal is as Guyanese as creek water yet, for a person to accomplish all three feats in a brief, three-year parliamentary career is exceptional.
Former President David Granger speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – described the ‘Charrandass effect’ as the unintended climax of efforts to erode the authority of political partners where, instead, those efforts wreck the entire partnership, paralyse the government and entail new elections. Mr. Granger recalled that the emergence of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) in July 2011 changed the political landscape by challenging more than six decades of ‘winner-takes-all’ party political practice.
Five parties – the Guyana Action Party; Justice For All Party; National Front Alliance; People’s National Congress Reform and Working People’s Alliance – crafted a Code of Principles to guide their efforts to repair the country’s fractured polity under the motto: ‘a good life for everyone.’
APNU participated in the 2011 General and Regional Elections as a single-list partnership winning 139,678 votes compared to the 2006 Elections when the People’s National Congress Reform-One Guyana won 114, 608 votes. APNU then signed the Cummingsburg Accord with its rival – the Alliance for Change – to form a single-list coalition in February 2015 winning 207, 201 votes in the 2015 Elections to gain a parliamentary majority and the presidency.
The Former President acknowledged that the Cummingsburg Accord, however, was faultily negotiated by a foreign agent who knew little of Guyana’s national Constitution and less of the country’s peculiar political culture and electoral system making it susceptible to the ‘Charrandass effect’.
Certain measures collided with the Constitution and were legally un-implementable; others misconstrued the powers of the executive presidency and misallocated strategic portfolios. Some candidates, contrary to the Constitution, were dual citizens, did not have connections with constituencies and did not share deep ideological beliefs and policies.
Mr. Granger suggested that, for future coalitions to avoid the ‘Charrandass effect’, parties should adhere to the provisions of the national Constitution, campaign publicly, commit to common policies and consolidate representation in geographical constituencies. The results of the 2018 Local Government Elections in the East Berbice-Corentyne electoral district in November 2018, for example, exposed the parties’ frailties and emboldened the People’s Progressive Party Civic’s ‘No-Confidence Motion a few days later in December 2018.
The former president recounted that the PPPC undertook to undermine the country’s first multi-party, multi-ethnic coalition administration that successfully challenged its winner-takes-all tactics. The person who was destined to destroy the Coalition is on the Parliamentary record as speaking convincingly in support of the APNU+AFC coalition’s 2019 budget in December 2018 but voted in favour of the PPPC’s no-confidence motion to bring down his own government a few days later. Leaked e.mail messages exposed his party’s high-level plot to vote against its own Government’s 2019 budget – an action that would have precipitated the APNU+AFC coalition’s collapse even prior to the PPPC’s No-Confidence Motion.
The former president expressed the view that the ‘Charrandass effect’ opened the opportunity for the restoration of the PPPC’s winner-takes-all, one-party style of government, characterised by contempt for civil society, the public service and trade unions.
