The result of the recent mid-term elections in the USA will not immediately put an end to the radical conservative challenge to liberal democracy, but the way the Republican Party has just been electorally routed must have given hope to the vast majority of those living in the autocratic world. Every so often, various interests come along to test the resilience of political and social systems, and such systems should be designed to appropriately confront such challenges. And troubling though the political situation in the USA remains, the position of this column has been that it would not have led to the destruction of the liberal democratic order.
Firstly, it is difficult to believe that those who have been socialised and arrived at such a level of political freedom over some 250 years would allow its destruction with nothing better in sight. Secondly, unlike countries such as Guyana ,where the following essential elements – the rule of law, separation powers, substantial federalism, independent judiciary, relatively free press, various levels of non-majoritarian representations, etc. – of a properly functioning democracy are essentially theoretical, they adequately exist in the USA, allowing sufficient inclusivity and checks and balances to make the destruction of the liberal democratic order highly improbable (‘Bidding autocratic revivals’ VV: 15/2/2026).
Yet it should be noted that the MAGA-era ideologies and threat, i.e. notions of white cultural and political dominance contained in contemporary civilisation theories, the fusion of nativist immigration and conspiracy grievance politics and their combination with radical backwards legal and religious narratives, etc. have not gone away. Some have argued that they have coalesced and hardened into a culture war machine that has become a doctrine rooted in ethnonationalism. Yet while liberal democracy might not be the final stage in the human struggle for freedom and development, it is that aspect of American exceptionalism that is on that road and has now demonstrated its resilience.
Where Guyana is concerned, the political situation is somewhat different: contextually it is ‘Israel lite.’ For nearly three-quarters of a century two large ethnic groups have been struggling for political power with the lost of many lives and the destruction of much property. Just as in Israel the answer is some kind of a two state solution, in Guyana it is some form of shared governance. But political leadership is wanting.
Indeed, the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP) was in celebratory mood when in 2025 the Democratic Party, which was nudging it in the direction of shared governance, lost power. Not without reason, it believed that the MAGA-orientated Republican Party in government would be more sympathetic to its effort to establish ethnic dominance in Guyana. However, with the Democratic Party once again having substantial power in Washington, the PPP has been making some conciliatory noises, and it will good if it is serious, and this decades-long governance standoff, which has been extremely harmful to Guyana, can be brought to an end.
In 2003, when PPP and the opposition People’s National Congress Reform signed a Constructive Engagement Agreement that the former then refused to implement, it was estimated that some 60% of the student populations was leaving the education system without any marketable qualifications, and that this was likely to become a major social problem. As Minister of Educations at the time, I started establishing arrangements that should by now have made it improbable for any student to leave the school system without marketable qualifications, and two decades should have mopped up the majority of those persons who had already done so.
I am not claiming that the system I left in place was perfect or even adequate: what I am certain of is that its orientations, its raison d’etre, was unavoidable if we wished to live in a united, caring and progressive society. The PPP’s attack upon African welfare has been universal – the distribution of government contracts, collective bargaining, mining concessions, etc. – but here I will provide an example having to do with education.
As a part of its alternative pathways in secondary education, by 2005, the Ministry of Education established the Basic Competency Certificate Programme (BCCP), intended as a 12 to 18 months competency-based programme that secondary students were to complete at about age 15 to gain a Level 1 National Vocational Qualification in the given areas. These national qualifications were to be based upon Caribbean Vocational Qualifications, which themselves were established according to international standards. A Level 1 qualification created a semi-skilled operative and was also the basis of further training. The BCCP was to be delivered via the Practical Instruction Centres (PIC) and the technical departments of secondary schools.
The PICs and the technical and vocational departments of secondary schools were to be used throughout the country in the evenings and at weekends to deliver a one year Skills for Life (SFL) programme based on the BCCP and providing a similar Level 1 certification. The first SFL programme began at the Beterverwagting PIC in 2006, and the plan was to universalise the programme to train about 4,000 persons per year to mop-up those already out of school.
The PICs were in existence long before the PPP came to government in 1992, but lo and behold, on 22 March 2025, I woke up to read that the Beterverwagting PIC had just been ‘commissioned’ (VV: 22/03/2025)! My investigations indicated that the PPP had aborted the programmes that I began and largely neglected these kinds of institutions in almost every African village, thus taking away the African competitive advantage in the vocational trades. I wrote then that if there is a single reason that no one, but particularly Africans,should support the PPP it is the tremendous harm it has caused to the African people over the over the last three decades.
The result is that last year, Lelon Saul, using the ‘theory of social death’, told us that, “The uneducated, violent, mindless, and credulous group of young people known as ‘scrapes,’ or ‘scrape-heads,’ are the result of Afro-Guyanese people’s economic, social, and cultural marginalization.” The theory offers a vital perspective for understanding how Afro-Guyanese have been systematically marginalized under the PPP/C regime.
Cultural erasure, institutional brutality, economic neglect, and political exclusion all contribute to the situation where Afro-Guyanese people are treated as second-class citizens in their own nation. Saul argued that to address this, Guyana’s ethnopolitical dynamics must fundamentally change and policy changes should guarantee fair representation and justice for all ethnic groups. (‘The Rise of the Scrape Heads,’ KN: 17/04/2025).
Just two few weeks ago, Adam Harris argued that, ‘The decline in education spans every section of the country’. He said that parents know the value of a good education and try to ensure that their children have at least one good meal a day because hungry children cannot learn. He said school-aged children can be seen roaming the streets and some graduate to petty crimes during school hours. ‘Many in the city can tell tales of young motorcyclists committing robberies and claiming that they have to eat!’
According to Harris, the government must accept the blame for the wages and salaries of teachers and public servants, who are mainly Africans, in general being abysmally low, and for there being very little monitoring in schools because the support system is not in place. In this era of oil, the excuse cannot be money to support the wages of public servants. Furthermore, too much of teachers’ time is wasted by their being forced to support government and PPP-sponsored events. At CXC and CAPE results time, the Ministry of Education boasts about producing the top students in the region, but ‘the few who do well represent a fraction of those who emerge from the morass we call the education system.’ (VV: 28/10/2026).
Guyana’s President Dr. Irfaan Ali has been traversing the world condemning the Israelis while over the last three decades in office, his government has been doing the same thing as them: seeking to establish ethnic dominance. And just as occurred in Israel, the ruling party has been accused of seeking to establish an apartheid state.
Of course, the regime will deny all of this and therefore should be made to conduct an independent ethnic disparity analysis that will contribute to assessing the veracity of the accusations that are being made, and if necessary, immediately establish remediation policies. Furthermore, as requested by the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, the government should establish and maintain a comprehensive system of disaggregated ethnic data in all relevant areas of social life.
