Under the watchful, progressive and most astute leadership of President Dr. Irfaan Ali, Guyana has been demoted to being an ‘autocratic’ state by the 2025 report of the V-Democracy Project, easily the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative venture dealing with the nature of democratic governance.
Guyana’s fortuitous hydrocarbon resources presented it with a marvellous opportunity to provide handsomely for both the present and future generations of Guyanese. But in a competitive democratic environment, particularly one as ethnically divided as Guyana, generational thinking and development requires national consensus, for regardless of the number of resources at one’s disposal, if properly done, projects are likely to be costly and may take decades to come to fruition. However, focused as the PPP is on hurriedly buying votes, few if any of the capital projects it has developed will last for twenty to thirty years and therefore constitute a waste of both national opportunities and resources.
The ‘return to democracy’ in 1992 held much promise, but both politically and economically, the PPP has led Guyana to this intolerable state largely because of its historic dictatorial ambitions rooted in ethnic – and particularly anti-African – domination. This political condition raises questions about the nature of the elections scheduled for 1 September 2025. But whatever we are voting for, no Guyane – and certainly no African – should vote for the PPP. Indeed, the Africans have a duty to properly strategise their voting and turn out in the largest possible numbers to make the greatest possible impact that keeps the PPP at bay.
Let me remind that among others, this column has repeatedly argued and demonstrated that in every possible way the PPP has used its last two decades in government to attempt to comprehensively suppress Africans to force them into its ranks. Indeed, the behaviour of the PPP towards Africans runs counter to democratic principles and national and international requirements that protect individual and minority rights against both the tyranny of the state and the majority.
What the PPP has done constitutes a crime against humanity. Imagine, the oligarchs in the PPP have created the most discriminatory social environment in the history of modern Guyana and is attempting to destroy the International Decade for the People of African Descent – Guyana because the organisation cannot possibly fulfill its mandate without addressing the issue of discrimination against Africans in Guyana.
The public service in general is largely manned by Africans and for two decades, like other public sector unions, the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU) has been fighting for collective bargaining to improve the meagre salaries of teachers, and recently the court ordered the government to proceed with collective bargaining.
This column has made the point that while teachers in Guyana have an average annual income of only about US$6,500, those in countries with comparable per capita income receive between US$30,000 and US$12,000 per annum. Only last week, the national press reported that while the PPP are paying Guyanese nurses US$850 per month it was advertising for Indian nurses at incomes of about US$2,000 per month!
What constitutes a huge tragedy for the working people is that instead of proceeding with normal collective bargaining, the PPP proceeded to undermine the union’s efforts and its chief negotiator, who has been at war with and has been dismissed by the union for acting improperly, is presently on the PPP’s electoral list!
With this kind of record as a backdrop, the general secretary of the PPP called on the population to give his party a two-thirds majority so that it would be able to unilaterally make constitutional reforms. Of course, the constitution requires major reforms if Guyana is ever to be properly managed, and I suspect that the general secretary would not need to be worried about getting a two-thirds majority if the proposals were sound.
I also need to draw to the general secretary’s attention that since the writing of the United States constitution in 1787, it has been recognised that constitutional reforms, particularly in an ethnically divided society such as Guyana, should seek to have the agreement of ‘substantially all’ of the citizenry and that is more than a two-thirds majority.
Commenting negatively on this very two-thirds majority request, Mr. Lincoln Lewis had related concerns that beg an important question relating to international elections monitoring. ‘We are standing at the edge of a dangerous cliff. The electoral system we have today, bloated voters’ list, cannot guarantee free, fair or credible elections. This is no technical glitch. It is deliberate. The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is under the thumb of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), aided and abetted by an international community that continues to prioritise its economic interests over the rights and dignity of the Guyanese people’ (‘No political party must be handed two-thirds majority in parliament,’ SN: 04/08/2025).
Of course, Guyana would not have been designated an autocracy by the V-Dem Project that seeks to deal with the ‘complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections,’ if the PPP was not involved in the kind of skulduggery Mr. Lewis identified.
Remember, according to the eminent American political theorist Samuel P Huntington, ‘Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. (But) governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable, but they do not make them undemocratic.’
At an operational level, last week, I noted that in his book ‘The Case for Democracy,’ Natan Sharansky argued that elections ‘are not a true test of a democracy. [They] ‘are never the beginning of the democratic process. Only when the basic institutions that protect a free society – a free press, the rule of law, independent courts, political parties, etc – are firmly in place can free elections be held. [Until then] elections are just as likely to weaken efforts to build democracy as they are to strengthen them.’
To address such operational concerns, V-Dem places emphasis on the liberal, egalitarian, participatory and deliberative components of democracy, and in its 2025 report, Guyana is placed 96 on the index of 179 countries. Jamaica is at 33, Barbados 34, Suriname 40 and Trinidad and Tobago 47. Guyana has been demoted from being a ‘grey zone’ electoral democracy: ‘The five grey zone electoral autocracies that could potentially be misclassified are Benin, Guyana, Indonesia, Mauritius, and Mongolia. According to the V-Dem data, the best estimate is that these countries no longer qualify for the minimum standards of electoral democracy. All of them except Benin are in episodes of autocratization.’
To address Mr. Lewis’s concern that the international community might be placing its economic interest above that of the wellbeing of the people of Guyana, this is not unusual behaviour for this category of operatives. While a liberal democratic outcome is still the ideal, in practise illiberal outcome are tolerated and that the current focus of the international observers in Guyana appears to be only elections day activities is indeed worrying. We will have to wait and see, but it is well known that elections are rigged long before elections day, and that is precisely what the PPP has been attempting to do.
Ironically but sadly, Cheddi Jagan’s aspirations for the 1992 return to democracy have been brought to nothing by the ethnically oriented successors his party opportunistically created.
This article was first published August 10, 2025 “Cheddi’s aspirations brought to naught“
