By Cary Fraser
Cary Fraser is a regular contributor to the Trinidad and Tobago Review and writes on international relations in the Middle East, American foreign policy, and Caribbean history. He teaches at the Pennsylvania State University.
The recent controversy arising out of GUYSUCO’s threat to withdraw its recognition of GAWU has opened a window into the internal feuding that has overtaken the PPP and it raises profound questions about the psychological and political distance between the current generation of party leaders and their political base in the sugar industry. For the PPP, control over GUYSUCO has been an important step in creating a managerial elite within the sugar industry that could be seen as representative of the Indo-Guyanese community which has toiled for generations to keep the industry alive under both private and state ownership. That approach to the management of the industry also ensured the party’s ability to ensure that the industry functioned within the parameters set by the party leadership. With both the workers and the management of the company being closely affiliated/tied to the ruling party, the PPP leaders have sought to control the evolution of the industry and its workers to ensure the party’s survival as an electoral force and to generate revenue for the party’s coffers.
As the 2011 election schedule bears down upon the PPP amid the internal struggle to select a Presidential candidate to replace Bharrat Jagdeo, the GUYSUCO-GAWU dispute has inevitably sparked concerns about its implications for the various candidates. The call by Moses Nagamootoo for GUYSUCO to withdraw its threat and to pay wage increases to the workers, followed by Bharrat Jagdeo’s statement that the recognition of GAWU would not be withdrawn under his government demonstrated that the party’s leadership recognized the high stakes involved in the dispute. The GUYSUCO leadership has been reminded that the company’s priorities must be determined by the political directorate which remains deeply indebted to the sugar workers and their union. The fiasco has opened wounds within the PPP that show the level of disagreement over the future of the party as it confronts its failings after 18 years in power.
In 1992, the PPP returned to power in a country that had been devastated by 28 years of PNC rule and that party’s failure to construct a post-colonial multi-racial political system that would guarantee effective representation for all communities/groups within the society. Unfortunately for the PPP, it chose to pursue a strategy of governance that replicated the mistakes of the PNC. It governed, especially after the death of Cheddi Jagan in 1997, on the premise that the PNC should be both stigmatized and excluded from any serious role in reshaping the political system. It was a blunder that has confirmed that neither wing of the nationalist movement that emerged in the 1950s – the PPP and the PNC – has yet shown a nationalist vision that could reverse the fragmentation of the society and its attendant consequences. For the PPP, that shortcoming has been accentuated by the fact that Bharrat Jagdeo, who was born in 1964 and became President in 1999, represented the emergence of a new generation who had not been witness to the traumas of 1962-64. However, his tenure as President has confirmed the PPP leadership’s inability to transcend the bitterness engendered by the “troubles” of the 1960s, and the Roger Khan episode, as well as the killing sprees that punctuated the years 2002-2009, have exacerbated the unease about the future of the society under the leadership of the PPP. In effect, the PPP remains trapped by its past and its fear of a future that would allow the society to escape the legacies of the 1960s – even after having chosen a new generation of leadership. The deaths of both Cheddi and Janet Jagan opened the way for the party to rethink its role in a fractured nation and to devise a meaningful strategy for inclusive governance. The party needs to move away from the decisions taken in the mid-1950s to abandon ethnic pluralism in its quest for power. In response to the Forbes Burnham-led effort to seize control of the PPP in 1955, the Jagans adopted a strategy of building an ethnic fortress based upon the apanjaht strategy – first clearly articulated in Cheddi Jagan’s address to the 1956 party congress. In that speech, Jagan tried to make “the East Indian section politically functional” according to Leo Despres, the anthropologist who conducted research among PPP activists and other “knowledgeable informants” on the PPP’s political strategy prior to the 1961 election. Further, Despres argued that Jagan sought to bring “East Indian capitalists” into the party for reasons of financial support and to encourage them to compete against the European and Portuguese business community that controlled much of the commercial sector in the colony. In effect, after 1956 the PPP would seem to have embarked upon a strategy of trying to reduce the influence of other ethnic communities and political groups, including the breakaway Burnham faction of the PPP, and to expand its grip upon the sugar workers and farmers among the rural Indian communities. It was an ambitious strategy based upon an appeal to racial solidarity that contributed to the departure of Martin Carter, Sydney King (Eusi Kwayana), and Rory Westmaas from the PPP – a major blow from which the PPP would not recover and which irrevocably damaged its claim to being a multi-racial nationalist movement. It was also a strategy that would ultimately fail as it spawned a counter-mobilization spearheaded by Peter D’Aguiar, Richard Ishmael, and Forbes Burnham which would open with the violent challenge to the 1962 Kaldor budget and episodic violence that rocked the colony over the next two years. The opposition campaign won British and American support for the ouster of the PPP at the 1964 election and the formation of a coalition government that led Guyana to independent status. After the 1964 election, a coalition government backed by Britain and the United States assumed power and the PPP were excluded from government for the next 28 years by a series of rigged elections starting in 1968.
Today, the PPP, after 18 years in office with support from Britain, Canada, and the United States, confronts a legacy of failed governance and economic stagnation which are the roots of the recent dispute between GUYSUCO and GAWU. The company is confronted by the adverse consequences of its management failures and the union faces pressures from its members who feel betrayed by the company’s willingness to treat its workers shabbily. The PPP government has had to serve as the mediator in a dispute between two of its most important constituencies at a time that it is heading into an election in which the Jagans are no longer there to provide the quality of leadership that kept the party united through its many difficulties. Racial solidarity has been ruptured by the appearance of open class conflict within the party. The GAWU-GUYSUCO conflict suggests that the PPP has become hostage to its pro-business wing, and notwithstanding the statements by Nagamootoo and Jagdeo, GAWU may be facing a fate similar to that suffered by the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers Union when it was “de-recognized” by the Bauxite Company of Guyana Incorporated in December 2009.
