Dear Editor,
In an ideal world we should all be apologising to the PNC.
That organisation has played a role in our history that ought to have earned it our gratitude. Instead we have, out of fatigue, misapprehension, racist bile or indifference, mostly talked bad about the party.
The fact of the matter is that the PNC was the only party, in the sixties, with the institutional structure and aptitudes to take up the mantle of leadership at a time when it was clear that the known foreign powers were not going to permit Dr Jagan to head the government. The PNC in a sense, had no choice or became history’s choice, and demonstrated remarkable tact and strategic mastery in its management of the transition. The idea of a coalition of all ‘progressive’ or ‘nationalistic’ forces, would have, at that time, merely meant the death of the nationalist movement. The fact being that the US and hence Britain would not have allowed a government in which Jagan had a role. Ideas, therefore, about joint premiership or partition or shared governance that could have brought social peace if not economic advancement, would have been premature, and only could have been possible post 1990 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is our first proposition.
Second then, and subsequent, is the fact that the economy grew for much of the PNC years and that the comic book portrayal of those times we get from some political activists and the ill-informed, is a sort of prurient propaganda whose sources in the national psyche need further examination. The fact is that the country was, like the PNC itself, victim of extraneous circumstances. From the PNC’s entry in government up till 1972, if memory serves me right, the World Bank reports that the economy grew as it had been growing since the end of the previous decade of the fifties. So from 1964 to 1972 – eight out of the 28 years the country was in good condition. There was a second period of growth starting in the Hoyte years. Attributable to pent-up demand or other changes. The Hoyte years added to the early Burnham years would mean that the Rev Gideon Cecil’s entrails-level complaint about rice flour, would have to be confined to the period of the post-oil shock, (and following the consequent fall in commodity prices) when things became critical. The economic hardship mixed with political repression was thus as a mixture mostly confined within the decade 1975-1985. Apart from those ten years, life under the PNC was mostly livable, sometimes great, and gloriously green and bubbling with new ideas and development and all the creativity of the Guyanese and Caribbean people that Independence unchained.
Third: The PNC was the only government that really had hands free to implement socialism and the egalitarian, pro-worker governance to which we have grown accustomed. During the pre-1964 period the PPP (both before and after the split) had set the pace, with progressive legislation that must have put us in the highest category of colonies anywhere. But in the post-1992 period the existing PPP found changed circumstances. The IMF was setting the rules and the socialist agenda had long been implemented and exhausted. If anything at all, by an irony of history. Dr Jagan never got to execute the communist policy and programme for which he sacrificed and was sacrificed. Concretely and objectively, the social progress and the dismantling of the capitalist cage in which we were found, is entirely the work of the PNC. Whatever the circumstances that accompanied the transition and the problems and disarticulations it created, it was good and progressive government.
Fourth: The fact is that the charges of racism levelled against the PNC arise mainly from the ignorance or prejudice of some of its detractors. The PNC prides itself on being a multi-cultural and multi-racial party with an ethnic mass base. All our parties, we say, suffer this dichotomy – ideal policy pasted over stark reality. Hoyte, like Burnham before him, bent over backwards to accommodate especially Indian Guyanese. The PNC courted Indian Guyanese politicians, intellectuals, holy men, workers leaders. The evidence is that many crossed the floor precisely because the PNC policies helped Indians also. The post-independence Burnham years saw more Indians benefiting from Guyanisation of the civil service and from exposure internationally than ever before in our history. The foolishness about sabotage of rice or sugar production to harm Indians has to be taken in the context of technical mismanagement which we still suffer, or a hostile international commodities environment. Bauxite also declined, and so we cannot say that the PNC was also trying to spite its own supporters in Linden.
The PNC always had inclinations to reunite the PPP’s two factions from one of which it was descended. But in reality this could only remain a frustrated sentiment. The PPP, having little negative to say about the general direction of the politics, was also right in looking at ways it could contribute to the development by remaining open to talk about shared governance at that time. It was tragic that the Jaganite faction of the PPP, which had done so much for the nation already, had to be denied participation in the new dispensation. But it was so.
As a matter of another fact, many or most of the ideas that the PNC put into practice came from the old united PPP, or were adapted from experience in other emerging ex-colonies. The contribution of the PPP to our social transformation is thus undeniable even though, ironically, it was at second hand and through the PNC.
It would appear to me that, disarmed by the fact that the PNC was mostly doing what Jagan would have himself done if he had won, that party had to fall back on race agitation. It orchestrated a campaign of racial discontent that saw Dr Jagan complaining abroad that Indians here were living a discrimination similar to apartheid. This was exaggeration. But for many, it would be the reality that they learnt and would transmit.
Fifth: The WPA, the spearhead of much of the seventies and eighties dissatisfaction with a PNC that had began to make its mistakes, rightly belonged as an extension or tendency of that party. Its leaders had more in common with the PNC than imaginable.
And another fact is that its call for free and fair elections was, as we now know, a terrible strategic error.
Remember that the Westminster system, perpetuated in Britain perhaps out of a divide between capital and labour, is not what we fondly imagine it to be – a winner-take-all system. It is in fact a system that takes care, in the House of Lords, to guarantee a place and a voice to the other half of society. Losers get seated in the upper house. So the problem in Guyana was less about free and fair under either first past the post or PR (either of which Jagan would tolerate once the numbers come out in his favour), than about guaranteeing a place for the perceived losers. Only that the realpolitik of the times would have meant re-imposing a PPP government in the face of Uncle Sam. We see how Manley fared in Jamaica and how Grenada ended up.
The WPA was mistaken. Calling then for free and fair elections in a context such as ours is, as Henry Jeffery phrased it in another situation, was ignoring the context in which we live.
This is I realised after reflection on what Hamilton Green was trying to tell me the last time we spoke. Always a fine analyst to listen to, Mr Green said that the 1992 reversal to “free and fair” under PR would have the net effect of imposing a dictatorship of one group and essentially would have the net effect of destabilizing the racial situation and increasing tension. He was right. So, many of us sympathised with the WPA as the country headed for a non-solution.
None of the above has any persuasive power in our situation. It is light in the balance against the weight of the prejudices we face.
Note that the PNC had done what it could to eliminate the class prejudices that were ingrained in the African-Coloured society. The party particularly favoured and promoted the folk of all origins. The days when you had to be Coloured to work on Main St were over. We now owned Main St. And so on. What the party could not dissolve or wish away was the prejudice, born of, let us be frank, ethnic identification simply, but also in some cases racial antipathy and a demonic distaste for all that was different. So, unless we see anti-PNC venom for what in some cases it is, we are incapable of lancing the sore that bites us.
So, in conclusion, the PNC has been victim of the fact that it had become the instrument of history for saving us from a fate like Cuba’s, where nobody is headed for Richmond Hill or Toronto on today’s flights because Castro won’t let them out. And the PNC is a victim of an unrelenting and pitiless propaganda organised by its opponents. Finally, or firstly perhaps, the PNC was victim of its own vagaries of maturation as a political party and government and of the frailties and perversities of some who chose to lead it. Underlying all of that is the fact that it fell, as many a government did elsewhere, into a period when the world economy changed irreversably, and no amount of wand-waving by the PPP now can change the fact that bauxite, rice and sugar was the economy that ended in the sixties.
When a list is made of all the PNC did, in these difficult circumstances, the mistakes it made do not efface themselves, but diminish in comparison.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
