Observers in search of signs that the customary post-elections season of brooding and sniping might be approaching an end would not have been encouraged by a photograph of President David Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo taken at a recent meeting between the two and released by the Office of the Presidency to the media. Far from sending a message suggestive of a possible thaw in relations between the new government and the opposition the photograph communicated a climate of coldness and a distinct lack of appetite for any sort of well-intentioned discourse. Looks, of course, can deceive, though viewed against the backdrop of President Granger’s oft-stated desire for constructive engagement with the opposition the distribution of the photograph to the media was a disingenuous piece of image management on the part of OP.
The President is on record as saying that a measure of cordiality, indeed, a working relationship with the political opposition and civil society is what his government wants. The sentiment was repeated very recently on the President’s behalf by Minister Raphael Trotman in the course of a disclosure that President Granger is set to make public a proposal for what is being loosely described as “inclusive governance,” which, again according to Trotman, might even see the inclusion of representatives of the PPP/C (and civil society) on delegations travelling abroad on official business.
That might of course be a longer term ambition since, in the first instance, the sticking point may well end up being how we define “inclusive governance” in the first place. There is, too, the matter of the feelings of the coalition’s constituency to consider on any ‘wrapping up’ with a political opposition with whom there is clearly no post-elections love lost.
However we choose to define ‘inclusive governance’ one might ask too whether we have as yet arrived at a place of political détente (for want of a better word) that provides the conditions for what the President says he wants.
The coalition administration’s post-elections focus on what it says has been widespread corruption under the PPP/C has generated a level of national political energy that rivals anything else on its agenda, so that the question arises as to whether there can be anything remotely resembling constructive government/opposition engagement proceeding simultaneously with nationally monitored and ongoing corruption investigations in which, up until now, at least one high-profile PPP/C former minister has already been implicated.
President Granger himself has so far sought to directly avoid the brouhaha over issues of corruption and accountability under the PPP/C administration, though it has to be said that once the more involved discourses on ‘inclusive governance’ begin, the goodwill that will be needed to drive those discourses could well be seriously undermined by ongoing audits, enquiries and investigations which, in themselves will generate a healthy measure of ill will and a souring of the environment for discourse.
Mr Jagdeo, upon his appointment as Leader of the Opposition, had made some placatory statements including an undertaking that the PPP/C understands its “obligation to the people” and that it would never “seek to remove benefits from the people…” uplifting words but words just the same. Are the coalition’s supporters not likely to hark back to what was widely felt to be the jingoistic edge infused into the 2015 elections campaign by Mr Jagdeo and wonder aloud about the sincerity or otherwise of the former President’s current undertaking?
For all the signs that this might not quite be the propitious moment, the President’s desire for better relations with the political opposition could be a ground-breaker that leads to the creation of a superior political culture. Truth be told there is a compulsive boorishness to a political condition that dictates that government and opposition must remain in a state of daggers’ drawn when other civilized and democratic countries find a way to behave differently.
Our particular dilemma is that the post-elections narrative has always been undergirded by rancour and ill will and accusations of ethnic and political witch-hunting, charges of rigged elections and sometimes, violence. We have simply been unable to slay those debilitating ghosts, though it must surely have occurred to the sane among us by now that post-elections sniping and ill will and reprisals cannot, forever, be the whole of our national agenda and that we simply must find a way of changing gear. That, it seems, is what the President thinks so that his announced initiative for government-opposition engagement must at the very least be put on the table, and the sooner the better, though both sides must bear in mind that as a nation we have become sick and tired of the frustration that so often attends seeming good intentions that eventually fall flat on their faces.
