Dear Editor,
From reading Mr Aubrey Armstrong’s interview in SN May 3, it remains distressingly clear that brilliant minds in the party and in the Afro-Guyanese intellectual class continue to believe that the party’s salvation only resides in the concepts of organizational design and strategic management. Mr Armstrong therefore adds his voice to the call for party restructuring and building a big tent. The not unexpected outcome is that answers to rescue the PNCR come across as inadequate, unconnected to political reality and, worse, uninspiring to the masses, in particular to the party’s support base.
At almost all levels within the party leadership (present and past), the solution-finding process throws up a standard menu of highly decent but second-level proposals. These include party restructuring, party group reformation, outreach to non-traditional supporters, and more recently, the big tent approach. The sheer number of committees, sub-committees and task forces that have been formed to execute these plans is impossible to count. For fundamental reasons, they have not changed the party’s political fortunes.
Thinkers in the party have failed (and have feared) to address the core reasons why these way-forward ideas produce next to nothing, despite good effort by good people. More broadly, they have also failed to analyze and deal with the PNCR’s declining electoral performance. Instead what we have is a recycling of good but inadequate ideas. Meantime, the PNCR slips deeper into the wilderness.
The good minds in the party have to put aside their egos, break out of their delusions and comfort zones, and recognize two realities that stand in the way of the PNCR ever again sitting in government. The first reality is the massive apathy over the last eight years among the PNCR traditional support base. This truth is obvious that nothing more needs to be said other than this: as the party continues to laze in the political wilderness it will become, and it has already become, more and more difficult to rekindle people’s interest and involvement. Should the party continue along this path, there may be a point of no return. Are the current ideas (even if one assumes some measure of implementation) capable of reversing this? Apathy is a problem connected to the hearts and souls of people that mechanical solutions cannot fix.
The second reality is harder to confront. It has to do with population numbers. The long course of history has put more Indians than Africans on the landmass of Guyana. Higher Indian birth rates have perpetuated this immigration advantage. Racial prejudice and PPP political mobilization have turned this into an entrenched electoral gain. What can the PNCR do about it? Even as a planning assumption, the PNCR should accept that should it effectively mobilize its traditional support base, the party will still be short of voters. Even so, the party must spare no effort to galvanize its base. That goes without saying.
Reaching out to non-traditional support, however, especially among Indians, is cast by too many in the party leadership as the party’s last electoral salvation. Counting from 1992, the party has fought four national elections, with winning cross-over votes as its central strategy. As matters have turned out, cross-over votes have not materialized to any meaningful extent. Of the four elections, the 1997 election was, it can be argued, the PNC’s most comprehensive and best-executed push for Indian and other cross-over voters. The results speak for themselves. That said, the party must continue to reach out to non-traditional voters. But again, if only as a planning assumption, the party should accept that these voters will exercise other choices at the polls.
It can only be described as reckless conduct, then, for the party to reject, even as assumptions, its natural demographic disadvantage and its inability to attract cross-over votes. Such a rejection may also reflect a personal selfishness among some in the leadership. True, there are vested interests within the party that force the party to ignore these realities (even if labelled as assumptions) despite the experiences of recent electoral defeats or the conclusions from statistical analysis or honest reasoning. But these vested interests can (and indeed, must) be assuaged by good leadership.
The deep disorder in which the PNCR finds itself requires more serious thinking than high rhetoric (or the combative tone of press conferences) seems to suggest is actually happening. It is time the good minds in the PNCR measure themselves not by how well they articulate ideas that are necessary but insufficient.
They should measure themselves (and we must measure them) by how courageous they are to present the strategies that can actually get the party back in government.
Mr Armstrong and other contenders must come better.
Yours faithfully,
Sherwood Lowe
