Different strokes: General elections in Guyana and Jamaica

A matter of mere hours after the close of poll following Jamaica’s December 29 general elections, Portia Simpson-Miller, perhaps surprisingly, only one of four women ever to be elected head of government in the Commonwealth Caribbean, had delivered her victory speech; outgoing Prime Minister Andrew Holness had conceded defeat, his two-month tenure as the country’s youngest ever prime minister having been the shortest ever. It was also the first time ever that a political party had been voted out of office in Jamaica after only a single term.

As an aside, Andrew Holness’ defeat raised – though in an entirely different context – a matter that has also been the subject of much public discourse in Guyana, namely, the pension entitlement of an outgoing head of government. With no minimum qualifying time limit having been placed in the law, it appeared to be the view in some quarters that the brevity of Mr Holness’ occupancy of office ought to have disentitled him to the full prime ministerial pension. That, however, is quite a different matter, except to state that former Prime Minister Holness now supplants former President Jagdeo as the youngest pensioner among former Caribbean heads of government.

Here in Guyana the outcome of the poll had remained unclear for more than two days after voting.  By then the country had drifted into a customary interregnum of shuttered business places, heightened security, a surfeit of worrying rumours, accusations of vote-rigging and ballot recount demands. Even now, a month and more after the poll, issues of verification of the result delivered by Gecom persist, never mind the fact that the Ramotar administration has long been installed.

All this is no more than a reminder of what the superstitious amongst us have come to regard as a curse of post-elections controversy though there are those who cite previous instances of vote-rigging as justification for the enduring suspicions regarding the veracity of elections results. Not so in the case of Jamaica where, according to a very recent BBC country profile “while elections have often been marred by violence, “their results have always been accepted.”

Other comparable circumstances that attended the elections processes in Guyana and Jamaica are both enlightening and instructive. First, there was the unseating by the People’s National Party (PNP) of its political arch-rival, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and, by contrast, the PPP/C’s retention of office in Guyana. The respective outcomes speak to distinct differences in the nature of political loyalties in the two countries. While the dominant political parties in both countries all enjoy separate and distinct constituencies, outcomes of elections in Jamaica,  including, notably, last December’s which handed a near two to one majority suggest that voter loyalty among Jamaicans is by no means set in stone. By contrast, here in Guyana, the dynamic of race has spawned more-or-less permanent and unchanging political constituencies which, to a greater extent, have made for mechanical electoral choices. Even the recent narrow loss of an overall parliamentary majority by the PPP/C provides no persuasive evidence of a change in that particular dynamic.

Secondly, there is what appears to have been a critical nexus between the personal political demise of former Prime Minister Bruce Golding and his party’s defeat at the December poll. Even allowing for the role which the JLP’s handling of the economy might have played in voter choices, the tainting of Mr Golding and his administration by the ‘Dudus’ Coke affair appeared to have contributed in no small measure to the JLP’s loss of political office. It is at this juncture that comparisons with Guyana are instructive. Last February, a besieged Bruce Golding bowed to political pressure and agreed to set up of a Commission of Enquiry into the ‘Dudus’ Coke extradition fiasco, a decision, which, in effect, precipitated his own political Waterloo, his appearance before the Commission of Enquiry having resulted in such considerable personal humiliation and loss of political ‘face’ that his subsequent resignation as prime minister remained his only realistic choice. That set the tone for the JLP’s political fortunes in the period ahead.

By contrast, the Jagdeo administration had persistently brushed aside repeated calls for a Commission of Enquiry into its alleged links with the now imprisoned Roger Khan and while, given the nature of constituency loyalty here, it is debatable whether the findings of such a Commission of Enquiry would have posed similar electoral challenges for the PPP/C, the point is that while in Jamaica Mr Golding was made to account publicly for his and his administration’s  role in the ‘Dudus’ Coke affair, an eventuality which, ultimately, impacted negatively on his party’s re-election prospects, the Jagdeo administration remained unyielding in the face of demands that it face a public enquiry on the Roger Khan affair. Thus, it ensured that the PPP/C carried no resulting ‘baggage’ into the general elections.  In Jamaica public and political pressure denied Mr Golding the option of evading his and his party’s accountability.

Thirdly, there are the respective roles played by the media in Guyana and Jamaica in the countries’ elections campaigns. Here in Guyana the near total dominance by the ruling party of state radio, television and newspaper accentuated by the untimely presidential ban on broadcasting by a key privately-owned television station, CNS Channel Six, lifted eventually in the face of local and external pressures, served to raise questions about the “fairness” of the elections process. Simultaneously, the PPP/C’s elections campaign was punctuated by a succession of quixotic attacks on sections of the privately-owned media, particularly by President Jagdeo, including his well-remembered description of their reporters as “vultures and carrion crows.” So pointed had the political control of the media become during the elections campaign period  that the OAS Observer Mission was moved to include in one of its reports an observation made by both the Media Monitoring Unit and a range of political parties that “the current campaign period was characterized by a perception of a limited differentiation between the state and the governing party use of media and resources,” a veiled euphemism for charging that the state media had been commandeered for electioneering purposes.

Minimal state influence over the mass media in Jamaica, a more robust culture of media freedom and laws and that superintend media freedom far more zealously than is the case in Guyana meant that no such controversies arose during the campaign period there. Interestingly, while, for example, the government, as a condition of the granting of broadcasting licences is empowered to commandeer air time for broadcasts of a national nature, the law explicitly prohibits it from using such broadcasts for party political electioneering.

In more ways than one some of the key differences in both the political culture and political behaviour in the two Caricom countries were exemplified during their recent respective general elections.