Former St. Vincent Prime Minister, Sir James Mitchell says racial tensions here cry out for redress and urged a distribution of power away from the centre.
His comments came during the Desmond Hoyte Memo-rial Lecture which he gave at the Grand Savannah Suite at the Le Meridien Pegasus Hotel on Friday afternoon. Sir James, a long-serving prime minister, had played a role in Caricom’s eventual push for fair elections here under Hoyte’s presidency.
In his lecture entitled ‘Restructuring the Guyana Stage’, Sir James posited that the question in this regard is how far the regional responsibility and devolution should go without fracturing the country.
He said with the continuing international pressure on the region’s economies “there is no way the winner-take-all principle of governance will lead to enduring peace” adding that no system that entrenches misery, however constitutional, will endure.
“As an outsider, I conceptualize that a country as vast as yours will enjoy greater residential choice if there is responsibility in the regions. The question is how far should that regional responsibility go and not fracture the country?”
He said provincial responsibility works elsewhere and could work in Guyana but not with a power vacuum in the regions. To this end he also recommended that a taste of power sharing with distribution of benefits away from a “cloistered centre” will enhance the whole.
“All that is needed is the declaration of the vision, together with the courage and patience to execute it. Power sharing is not about sharing the existing cake – adding ingredients attracted from new resources expands the cake,” he recommended to the gathering which included President Bharrat Jagdeo, Opposition Leader Robert Corbin and several ministers of Government .
Hoyte’s widow, Mrs Joyce Hoyte also attended the lecture which opened with brief reflections by former Foreign Minister Rashleigh Jackson and PNCR Chairman Winston Murray.
Sir James also said he feels that at the centre of government, Guyana’s racial tension “cry out for redress”. He suggested that a directly elected president and vice president would “force both sides to contemplate harmony”, with an ethnically mixed presidential and vice presidential team. Sir James felt that Guyana’s problems of the impact of race on politics are similar to those in Trinidad and Tobago. “If both your countries had their executive president and vice president elected directly by the people is it not obvious that political parties would be forced to select candidates for these offices from the different ethnic groups?” he queried.
“Would not the realities of such a power structure produce economic results which must impact on fairness in society as a whole?”, he further queried.
He added “As you have already seen, a country of mixed ancestry may freeze ethnic opportunity at its peril. Can all political parties summon the courage to make such a leap of faith and translate the possibility into a new constitution?”
From his experience he said what was needed were a mixture of proportional representation and constituency representation and a mixture like the American system of committees and ministerial appointments outside of Parliament answerable to those committees.
Citing Barbados as a “shining light of democracy”, Sir James said “I worry about the other extreme, where incipient tyranny erodes freedom of expression, even as the sinews of checks and balances become frayed”.
Sir James threw out a question: “You the people of Guyana, a country larger than England, can ask yourselves why, with all your comparative advantage of plenitude of resources, is your currency less valuable than the currencies of Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean?” He stressed that in finding an answer, it was not enough to conclude with historic blame, adding that history does not evolve through blaming parents or the previous generation of leaders.
He also put the question of the extent to which the quality of the Guyana constitution may be responsible for the country’s debt and to what extent the constitution could be blamed for instability.
He admonished that the way forward was not simply to seek answers through the election of a new crop of leaders, but to create the constitutional framework to provide maximum use of all the human resources, which will in turn impact development of natural resources in a way that would engender a better quality of life.
“A frozen structure that confines opportunity within ethnic boundaries cannot yield the greatest possible prosperity for all”.
Mustique
Sir James said he felt it was important for the 1986 meeting of Caricom leaders on the Vincentian island of Mustique where Hoyte was pressed on the need for fair elections to be understood. He noted that leaders in Caricom had heard of the irregularities in Guyanese elections and knew that overseas voting through representatives in many of the islands was fraudulent since there was simply not the number of Guyanese then in the islands that the votes indicated.
“We read of the analysis in England and the United States, where certain addresses of voters did not exist. We learnt of skewed results in certain villages in Guyana,” he said. He said that very early in his political life he had witnessed the impact of socialism here on the closure of businesses and became familiar with the social tensions between the Afro and Indo Guyanese. Sir James said he was sympathetic to the concerns of the then People’s Progressive Party (PPP) opposition since he too had been in opposition but then elected as prime minister in July 1984, a position he held for close to 16 years.
He said he opposed a proposal from the late Dominican Prime Minister, Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica to throw Guyana out of Caricom over rigged elections and move the secretariat from these shores. This among other issues resulted in him calling the Mustique meeting, shortly after Hoyte was elected as president, and following the meeting the leaders attending were able to make him agree to the regional and international community observing elections here. Hoyte was also urged to give the opposition some space.
Sir James said he had also met with PPP leader, Dr. Cheddi Jagan after he had said he was inclined to boycott the next election and convinced him that he shouldn’t and explained that observer missions had been put in place. The 1985 elections were thought to be the most blatantly rigged. Jagan subsequently won the 1992 elections.
Recounting the Mustique meeting, Sir James said “We sat in the shade of a balcony looking across the islands and the Caribbean sea. We were all very cordial to one-another.
Desmond outlined the events, the procedures, the areas of support and the outcome of the (1985) election. He was emphatic that he had secured substantial support among the Indian community, apart from the traditional Afro-Guyanese. We got Eugenia to understand that we could not, nor should we, attempt to move the secretariat out of Guyana, and that the threat of expulsion was a non-starter”.
Sir James said he remembered urging Hoyte that if he had the Indian backing he claimed he had he should lift the ban on the importation of flour and “let the Indians have their roti without the expensively smuggled flour”.
Perfunctory
Sir James said there was still not enough being done by Caricom and the Organization of American States (OAS) with regards the observing of elections. He said it was not sufficient for the two to send in a perfunctory team to witness infractions only on polling day. He said it was important to determine whether or not the electoral commission’s or the supervisor of election’s integrity is unquestioned. He noted too that it was important to know that sectors of society outside the political parties have confidence in the electoral process.
“The observers should be in a position to declare before polling day that all systems are in place for a free and fair election. This means that the institution sending in observers should establish a presence in sufficient time to assess the credibility of the process, including the adherence to the spirit and letter of the laws,” he stated.
He insisted that election monitoring teams must be in a position to declare that electoral commissions or supervisors of elections have done their job to internationally accepted standards.
This, he said, would mean being on the ground with sufficient time to satisfy such criteria with the appropriate public comment. Meanwhile, Mitchell urged that Caricom prepare a report on governance in its territories on an annual basis. He said he was aware that Caricom regularly appointed a prime minister to be responsible for its governance, but was unaware whether any such report was done.
Further he said that with each election there should be a conclusion by the citizens of a country that democracy has been advanced.
Sir James’ lecture was the second to be arranged by the People’s National Congress Reform to remember its leader and former president.
