Guyana must have been a huge disappointment to the late President Jimmy Carter, who left the country in 2004 with the following parting words: “Jagdeo is an intelligent and capable leader, but he takes full advantage of the ancient ‘winner take all’ system in Guyana. Following my meeting with him, I was very doubtful that his political party [the People’s Progressive Party -PPP] would commence new dialogue with the PNC [People’s National Congress], be willing to make any substantive moves to implement the National Development Strategy, share political authority with other parties, or permit members of parliament to be elected by their own constituencies instead of being chosen from a party list on a proportional basis.’ If this is not an indication of disappointment, I don’t know what is, and that was not the end of the story!
Jimmy Carter the 39th president of the United States of America (1977 to 1981) came to the presidency two years after the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, which is considered the turning point in Cold War relations in Europe. Carter and his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, played an important part in that developing drama, which led to the collapse of Soviet communism. It also made the stated intention of the PPP to introduce communism in Guyana and the Caribbean irrelevant and thus made it possible for that party to come to government in 1992.
Importantly, by the Declaration, the West, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries acknowledged the existing national boundaries in Europe and adopted ten major points of international diplomacy, one of which was a commitment to uphold human rights – the Achilles heel of Soviet-type communism. Encouraged by the USA, the Vatican, etc, dissidents in Eastern Europe began to demand their human rights and a widespread movement against communist rule emerged. Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia in 1976 and Solidarity in Poland in 1980 are products of this development. In 1982, the Carter Center was founded, driven by an unwavering vision of peace and human rights and in 1989, the same year the Berlin wall fell, Poland held its first democratic election since the Second World War.
Forbes Burnham was very much in touch with this general global movement and the power sharing aspects of the 1980 Constitution were not placed there by accident. The democratic opening in 1992 allowed the ethnic political nature of Guyanese society, which had been submerged under Burnham’s autocracy, to show its full colours, and nowhere has this kind of social configuration been democratically managed without, as Carter recommended, the removal of the winner-takes-all political system.
The Carter Center did not return to Guyana until 2015, when in various places in their joint manifesto for national and regional elections of that year, the APNU+AFC coalition promised to abolish the winner takes all political system of governance by establishing ‘a Constitutional Reform Committee with a mandate to complete consultations, draft amendments and present same to the National Assembly for approval within nine months.’
The areas recommended for consideration by the Committee included: election of the president by a majority of electors; separate elections for the presidency and national assembly; shared executive power between the president, the prime minister and the cabinet, a cabinet comprising parties that have achieved at least 15% of the vote at the national elections; a prime minister coming from the party that secures the second highest votes in the presidential elections and with increased executive powers and responsibility over the cabinet, and the reduction of presidential constitutional immunities.
The Coalition won the 2015 elections but failed to fulfill its manifesto promise to substantially reform the Constitution. The national and regional elections of 2020 were ushered in by a no confidence motion brought by the PPP, and during the five months long dispute resulting from those elections the Carter Center left Guyana. And because of its posture during the dispute, its request to return and participate during the recount process was refused refused by the APNU+AFC government.
‘Carter Center (is deeply) Disappointed Not to Be Able to Return to Guyana’ (CC Atlanta, May 21, 2020), stated that ‘Regardless of the outcome of the election, the Center reiterates the view that Guyana’s winner-takes-all system needs to be reformed and encourages all parties to commit to national reconciliation and to completing key constitutional reforms in the near future.’ The PPP came to government after the 2020 dispute and as was expected, governance in Guyana has become so autocratic that regardless of the outcome of the election in 2025, the PPP has already fatally compromised the pathway towards liberal democratic governance in Guyana.
At a personal level, in about 1994 when I was the minister of housing, I read in a magazine that President Carter was associated with Habitat for Humanity that provided housing for low-income persons by way of a self-help arrangement. Having as a child participated in such a group in Beterverwagting/Triumph Village and having grown up in the resulting house, this type of cooperation has remained attractive to me. Furthermore, in the early years of the 1992 PPP/C government, incomes were too low for many families to be able to purchase their own homes in the usual manner. I asked President Cheddi Jagan to speak to Jimmy Carter, who was in Guyana at the time, with a view to establishing a local branch of the organisation. Jagan informed me that Carter asked for a request letter, which I delivered, and the rest is history.
Please note that the Carter Center’s 2020 position mirrors the late president’s 2004 parting comments and suggests that so far as governance is concerned, there continues to be a fundamental rift between the center and the ruling political elites in Guyana.
Nonetheless, many of the national comments about Jimmy Carter, while referring to his proposal of and contribution to the development of Guyana’s the National Development Strategy, which he hoped would be a development platform around which all stakeholders could unite, focused on his contribution to negotiating the 1992 democratic opening in Guyana. This is largely because that it is about all the political elites wish to remember!
