The AFC is adamant in its refusal to join a pre-election coalition with old parties mired in old politics and its Acton Plan 2011 speaks of its seeking to establish “A liberal democratic culture for Guyana (based on) Western democratic political systems, such as Australia, the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, India, Brazil and others.” These are however all essentially majoritarian systems with a commitment to political arrangements that are – in my view – fundamentally unsuited to an ethnically divided society such as ours. As a matter of fact, in many of its calculations, the AFC appears to view Guyana as if it is a, more or less, mature liberal democracy that could sustain ‘normal’ institutions. For example, only recently, its presidential candidate, defending his party’s support for the Broadcasting Bill and the level of executive control that Bill allows over the National Broadcasting Authority, reminded us that 95 percent of the proposed legislation
