I thank Prime Minister Mr Samuel Hinds for taking the time to clarify some of the comments I made in this column last week, in his letter “Shared governance not shared government” (SN 19/04/2013). I have little doubt that it was his honest assessment of our condition.
However, it is rooted in a major misconception but one he could easily rectify if he begins to see the existing ethnic mistrust as essentially the outcrop of the manner in which divided societies are managed and their socio/economic results are perceived to be distributed, rather than as resulting from the mere existence of various ethnicities.
If he adopts the former view he will see that the answer lies in our persistently trying to find methods of management that will progressively ease the above perception. He will also come to know that a solution will not be found in his, more-or-less, laissez faire keeping of “the faith in the aspiration of our national motto, as we find and promote ways to increase socialization across our differences, so that we get to know each other more, have more shared experiences, and one day, unannounced and unheralded, we would find ourselves all Guyanese.”
However, I believe that before we can arrive at a clearer view of where we need to go, we need to stop viewing ourselves as victims of our context. The PM points to past and recent incidents of bad faith on the part of the PNC and proceeds as if oblivious to similar bad faith on the part of the PPP/C.
I know of no other “democratic” government that has failed to fulfil so many agreements made across the board – with civil society, the trade unions and the opposition – without there being recourse to major social unrest!
Last week I claimed that the prime minister did not support “executive shared governance” and he clarified as follows: “What I said was that we support shared governance but not shared government; that shared governance was not beyond us who offered critical support at a time when our state was in a difficult position, even whilst we (PPP) were being cheated (rigged elections) and abused.” As is obvious from the quotation, the prime minister did not provide definitions of what he meant by “shared governance” or “shared government”; he simply gave an example of “shared governance” which, followed to its logical conclusion, is unhelpful.
The best case is that he is simply speaking of normal opposition/government cooperation, which makes his new conceptualisation redundant or, more controversially, he is seeking to indicate that, notwithstanding the nastiness of Burnham’s PNC, his party was willing to cooperate with it. If the latter, he is indeed breaking new conceptual ground, for from this standpoint, many would argue that shared governance already exists!
The PPP went into the 1998 arbitration with the Public Service Union promising to abide by the decision of the tribunal. However, nearly a dozen years later (and there has been no change since then) Stabroek News headlined an article “Many 1999 strike issues still unresolved;” (SN: 11/02/2010) and the president of the union lamented that “while the salaries were paid other fundamentals in the agreement were not heeded to”, and the government continues to persistently intimidate the union and its members.
As we speak, the government is in court over the distribution of radio licences mainly to its friends and as Stabroek News has observed: “As things stand, this government and the past one have breached any number of undertakings to its political partners and stakeholders in the broadcast sector. The original agreement between former President Jagdeo and the late former President Hoyte lies in tatters.” (‘The trouble with the licence for CCTV’; SN 18/02/2013).
The prime minister claims that the PPP suffered rigged elections but fails to account for the 176 persons who lost their lives trying to keep what they perceived to be a PPP bent upon imposing communism in Guyana from doing so. I have argued elsewhere that majority rule is not an end in itself: it is a means to the good life.
And what constitutes the good life cannot be determined by majority rule but by a constitution that has the support of all or at least substantially all of us.
Further, the PPP has travelled the globe supporting all manner of dictatorial communist regimes under the guise of representing an advancement of bourgeois, liberal, democracy!
All of this suggests that the PPP did not (perhaps still does not) understand the nature of democratic governance and its place in the general scheme of things.
Indeed, it is no wonder that some maintain that if the PNC or some other bulwark against the PPP had not existed, that party would have contrived to utilise its ethnic majority to keep us under some kind of proletarian dictatorship!
To my claim last week that according to media reports, Prime Minister Hinds did not recognise that Mr Hoyte had changed his mind on shared governance before he died, he corrected thus: “Further, I said that Mr Hoyte, until he was worn down by opposite arguments in his party, maintained three fundamental criticisms and that Mr Hoyte had changed his view by the time of his death.”
This kind of conceptualisation tells its own story. More than ever today, our society needs open minds rather seeing a change of mind as necessarily the result of being “worn down.” The distinguishing characteristic of a dogmatic and closed mind is that it does not change even after being presented with new information and conditions.
Prime Minister Hinds quoted me as claiming that “Democracy requires two (or more) competing political parties each of which has earned the respect of the broad masses, and each of which could form a government under which all believe that they can live.” I still stand by this as a representation of politics in normal situations. However, like the prime minister I recognise that our situation is not normal and thus “our troubles so far are largely not unexpected, when one thinks of the way our different fore parents were thrown together.”
The prime minister knows well that, as I have publicly indicated on many occasions, I have had and still have concerns about the establishment of shared executive government in our context.
What I reject is the largely do-nothing (in anyone else I would have said self-serving) utopianism of his way forward which, in the face of heightened ethnic tensions after two decades in office, suggests that we await “the creation of the perception and reality of a “Guyanese umbrella” under which we all live, aware of all our differences yet extending and accepting hands of assistance to and from each other; looking out for each other and ready to learn from and to teach each other!”
