‘Attempting to normalise the PPP’s autocracy’ 

Controversy has erupted as the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government that for decades has not been able to electorally take control of the management of Georgetown attempts to do so by autocratic means which are in effect destroying what is left to be destroyed of electoral democracy at the local level, and thus hurling Guyana further down the dictatorial road. 

The battered and filthy condition of the capital city largely results from its not having the institutional and financial capacity to do what is necessary to make it a well functioning modern capital city, and this is largely the making of the PPP. 

When it came to government in 1992,  rather than attempting, like its predecessor, to improve the condition of the city by implementing and where necessary improving upon what it found, the PPP by way of strategic delays, etc. hindered the city’s development in the hope that the resulting poor condition would pressure its largely Afro Guyanese population and others to electorally place it in control of the Georgetown City Council. 

The regime’s present direct seizure of important aspects of city government is a recognition that, as was made clear during the last general elections, Africans in general will not fall pray to its machinations. Adding his voice to the condemnation, former mayor, Mr. Hamilton Green, drew attention to how during his long mayorship the PPP undermined every effort the City Council made to improve its financial and institutional capacities. 

Green argued that the PPP hounded his predecessor from office and introduced and more adequately funded an IMC that did not achieve very much. (‘Some leadership will stop at nothing in their quest to control capitals and major towns’. Kaieteur News, 3 April 2026). 

Most people are aware of the overarching political/ethnic machinations of the PPP, but what is innovative is that its more ardent supporters are now attempting to normalise its dictatorial behaviour. In response to Mr. Green’s complaint Mr. Sultan Mohamed, wrote: ‘Mr. Green left out a significant fact in his letter when he gave a synopsis of how he became Mayor of Georgetown in 1994 after the municipal elections. He lamented the governing PPPC attempt to take control of the city. But isn’t that what politics is all about?’ The answer is a resounding: no. Certainly not democratic politics at the institutional or individual level. 

Take the case of Singapore, which on the face of it one might consider a quite successful democracy and which some in the PPP have been advising it to copy, largely, I believe, because while in the 1950s it had about the same GDP per capita as Guyana, today it is one of richest countries in the world, with a GDP per capita of about US$132,000 to Guyana’s US$32,000 (taking into consideration its oil bonanza). 

I believe also that the fact that Singapore also holds regular elections which the same ethnic political party has been winning since the 1950s is also an attraction to the PPP’s ethnic base.  

However, briefly, according to the overall 2026 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Index,  Singapore is ranked 87 – not far from Guyana’s 92 – and on the specific Electoral Democracy Component Index, which ‘captures not only the extent to which regimes hold clean, free and fair elections, but also the existence of actual freedom of expression, alternative sources of information and association as well as male and female suffrage and the degree to which government policy is vested in elected political officials,’ while Guyana is in a ‘grey zone’ at the bottom of the electoral democracy category, Singapore is classified as a full-fledged electoral autocracy.  

Note that the hallmark of modern autocracies is to hold elections as they strip the population, or a part thereof, of their right to self governance and attempt to placate them with false claims that this is necessary if they are to be able to provide the necessary material inputs to significantly improve the standard of living. Thus the 2026 Index also warned that the fact that ‘electoral democracies are growing in numbers should not be misinterpreted as good news.’ 

At the individual level for example, a  reporter asked the current Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. Mark Carney – who, since his recent presentation at Davos that the existing international order is being put to rest, has become an initiator of a new rule-based international order protective specifically of middle-power – if he intended to prorogue parliament if he did not get the required majority to support his agenda to deal with the cost of living, increasing fuel prices, etc. 

The question was quite legitimate as Canadian governments have frequently used prorogation to thwart parliamentary impasses. What was telling was that the PM must have grasped the question’s importance in this era of growing autocracy, for although it was the last to be asked, he skipped the others and went straight to it, stating that proroguing never entered his mind. 

He said he will work with the opposition and is prepared to make the necessary concessions to  get his agenda completed. This is how a democrat is expected to work: one cannot do anything to hold on to power and still believe that you should be classed as or are a democrat.  

But there is a more important dimension to Mr. Mohamed’s position. He is suggesting that the PPP drive for ethnic dominance is simply politics and not racism, and while this is also the claim of many honest people, it is also the usual refuge of opportunists. But even if one allows such a questionable explanation, in a competitive democratic context the effect on the other side – in this case the Africans and Amerindians – would be the same in terms of their political freedom and their right to determine what is equitable and whether it exists in the extant context. 

Largely because of this, the PPP has been running from the United Nations demand for countries to provide ethnically disaggregated data and the local request for the production of ethnic disparity analysis to factually show how the nation’s wealth has been and is being distributed and what, if anything, needs to be done to correct the situation. In passing, added to the above and given the perennial problem of getting the national census published in reasonable time, the Bureau of Statistics should, like the Auditor General’s office, be placed under the purview of the National Assembly. 

Mr. Sultan Mohamed also made the false claim that headlined his letter ‘Green was first to torpedo power sharing’ in Guyana.  When Forbes Burnham accepted power sharing when it was offered by the British during the independence negotiations of in the 1950s/60s, the PPP rejected it. The rejection was at the national level where it actually matters, but of course by the time that offer was made, Cheddi had already committed the PPP to Stalinist proletariat internationalism.

Recognising the dilapidated condition of the social infrastructure, as soon as Desmond Hoyte took government and made peace with the international financial institutions in the latter half of the 1990s, he set about fixing them. Accepting that, apart from its physical infrastructure, the urban areas needed modern management arrangements, he initiated a US$2m Urban Development and Housing Project intended to: 

‘(a) support reforms to address the institutional constraints affecting Guyana’s capacity to finance, operate, maintain and expand urban infrastructure and services on a sustainable basis, and (b) finance the rehabilitation of infrastructure and the reestablishment of municipal services in the country’s six urban municipalities.’ 

US$4.4 million was to be spent on the institutional strengthening of the management of the 6 municipalities and the relevant central government department and US$19m on municipal infrastructure development.’ 

The PPP was not interested in improving the management of the city so dragged its feet on the drafting of the project and in early 1995, ‘further work was suspended until January 1998, when Government gave the project its highest priority’.  The first disbursement was made in August 2000 and the last in June 2007, which included a two-year extension, six months of which resulted from sloth in implementing the reform component of the project. 

The 2008 Project Completion Report (PCR) stated that ‘Generally the Government of Guyana’s response was untimely and resulted in additional delays to the project. This is evident in that it took more than 2 years to carry out a transparent transfer of resources to the municipalities, and this process is still incomplete.’ 

The 2009 ‘Commission of Inquiry into the Operations of the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown’ (the Burrowes Report) observed that while the UNDP programme was intended to focus on infrastructure development and institutional strengthening, ‘the programme focused almost exclusively on infrastructure development.’  

The PPP is an autocratic contraption and in normal circumstances a unified opposition, robust and active civil society, independent media, and sustained non-violent mass pro-democracy protests such as the recent 7 million strong ‘No Kings’ protests in the USA are essential to put the brakes on autocracy. In a context such as Guyana, where even the possibility of these factors appearing does not seem to exist, what is to be done?