‘Guyana’s autocratic decline’

I am yet to come upon a reputable socio/political index that has presented the People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP) government in a sufficiently favourable light to prevent its propagandists from concocting all manner of folly in defence, and the 2025 World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index is no exception.  Since its ethnic/ideological basis makes it near impossible for it to change course, one must expect that it will continue to chastise the various messengers.

2016 was the first year that a substantial number of Caricom states were included in the Index that began in 2015, and the truncated comparisons below indicate that whatever may have been the democratic aspiration of Cheddi Jagan, by 2016 Guyana was well on its way to becoming the autocracy/dictatorship. 

The political process year to year comparisons, do not provide sufficient space for one to make sensible judgements about the progress of political regimes, and on many occasions it is merely the regime comparing against itself. Thus, the numbers below are more expansive and even suggest that during the APNU+AFC Coalition years (2015-2020) the situation marginally improved ,only to plummet again during the PPP’s reign.  

Table 1. Overall country ranking

*Denmark, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad & cTobago

Table 2. Guyana rankings in 4 areas

Apart from the overall ranking, the World Justice Index contains measurements in 8 areas, but in the interest of brevity, I present only the first four most important: Constraints on Government Powers (COGP) measures, the extent to which, by constitutional and other institutional means governments are bound by law; Absence of Corruption (AOC) measures covering bribery, misappreciation of public funds, improper influencing public officials, etc; Open Government (OG) – the extent to which a government shares information, empowers people with tools to hold them accountable, fosters citizen participation, etc., and (FR) Fundamental Rights (OG), which recognizes that a system of law that fails to respect core human rights is at best “rule by law” and does not deserve to be called a rule of law system. 

The excluded four areas are: (1) measures how well a society ensures the security of persons and property; (2) regulatory enforcement, which deals with the extent to which regulations are fairly and effectively implemented and enforced; (3) civil justice measures – whether ordinary people can resolve their grievances peacefully and effectively through the civil justice system, and (4) that which considers whether the delivery of criminal justice takes into consideration the entire system – the police, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, prison officers etc.

The 2025 Index report tells us that it is built upon a conceptual framework developed in consultation with academics, legal practitioners, and local community leaders around the world. A set of five original questionnaires was administered to experts and the general public. These questionnaires are translated into multiple languages and adapted to reflect commonly used terms and expressions. Codification maps collected data into 44 rules of law sub-factors. 

These questionnaires gathered input on a range of topics from practitioners who frequently interact with state institutions. More than 4,100 surveys, representing an average of about 29 responses per country, were collected from February 2025 through June 2025. This data complements the household data with assessments from in-country practitioners and academics with expertise in civil and commercial law, constitutional law, civil liberties, criminal law, labour law and public health. 

 Final scores are constructed using a five-step process and the data is subjected to a series of tests to detect significant changes and identify possible biases and errors. The sub-factors are cross-checked against more than 90 third-party sources drawn from local and international organizations. There is an external review and validation process to assess the statistical reliability of the results. The Project periodically invites the Econometrics and Applied Statistics Unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre to perform a sensitivity analysis of the Index.  This analysis confirms that the WJP Rule of Law Index is a reliable tool with statistical coherence and a robust structure.

Yet, the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance wants us to believe that the 2025 report is based upon old data. But even more alarming, resting its argument on Guyana’s fortuitous oil wealth, we are presented with the following nonsense. ‘By its own admission, the report states ‘where rule of law is stronger, so is the economy’. Guyana, as one of the fastest growing economies, is a living example of this!’  Apart from the accidental nature of Guyana’s economic growth, how many autocratic/dictatorial regimes do not have strong economies? The ministry must also not have heard of the difference between ‘rule of law,’ and ‘rule by law’ – the latter of which is very much associated with dictatorships.  

At the launch of World Justice Project in 2015, the famed Zimbabwean human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa noted that, ‘In the developing world, we generally have a political leadership that always looks at the rule of law as a foreign imposition from the West, without regard to the fact that the rule of law is in fact probably even more important for the developing world.’ (World Justice Project Annual Report 2015 ). This has been and still is the propagandistic cry of dictatorial leadership everywhere and notwithstanding the comprehensive process outlined above, the PPP’s Dr Walter Persaud seeks to defend the regime with this very archaic, obfuscatory, autocratic garbage. 

He claimed that the Stabroek News editorial’s conclusion that democracy in Guyana is on the decline ‘while understandable, is premature. It reflects a deeper issue: how international agencies acquire and exercise the power and authority to define the meaning of freedom and rule of law in societies of the Global South. The solution is not to reject external evaluation but to transform its basis. Global benchmarks should engage with the societies they classify and describe, grounding their claims in dialogue with local scholars, journalists, and civic actors instead of an inherited imperial authority. … Freedom cannot be reduced to a number; it must be interpreted within context and culture’ (SN: 03/11/2025).

As we have seen, studied efforts have been made to account for the current and local/cultural contexts and it matters not how it is contextualised for sake of comparison it is most likely that the outcomes will be communicated as numbers and those in the reports under consideration well represent the existing dictatorial situation in Guyana.