In the run up to the 2015 elections the talk among the APNU+AFC hierarchy was that they expected to win by about three seats, but as it turned out they won by less than one. In the immediate aftermath of the elections the PPP/C claimed that they were rigged and in response to that statement I wrote in this column `Dear PPP, No one cares!’ (SN 27/05/2015). Quite apart from my concern about governments being in power for long periods of time, the major reason I was pleased the PPP/C lost the elections was because it meant the end of the party’s pernicious effort to dominate the political space in Guyana.
However, now that the PPP/C is about to go to congress it might be a good time to indicate that from my assessment, properly utilised, one of the very factors that led to its demise can now contribute to its redemption, and this is enhanced by the far from sterling performance of the current regime.
Unlike the PPP/C and some of its supporters, for me democracy (majority rule) it is not an end in itself but a means for providing the good life for the citizenry, and the PPP/C attempt to dominate the political space was in contradiction to that goal.
That important limits must be placed upon the capacity of governments to interfere with the liberty of the people is a well recognised principle of democratic politics. Apart from its philosophical basis, which can be found even in the work of Thomas Hobbs, the inventor of the authoritarian Leviathan state, at the practical level Magna Carta (1215), the United States Bill of Rights, (1791) etc. have shown that whether established by God or man, there must be limits to the power of governments.
It is not here a question as to whether and why the PPP/C sought to establish political dominance. The answers to this range from those who believe that the party leadership was simply evil to others, such as myself, who have argued that the attempt was a shortsighted and backward effort to deal with the unusual structural factors contained in our political landscape.
What is now widely accepted is that the party, with its efforts to destroy all organisations associated with the opposition, to monopolize the communications sector, to deliberately transfer national wealth to its close associates, to inject its supporters in the upper echelons of the state sector, etc., was bent upon establishing the kind of political dominance that was a threat to the human rights of every citizen.
Most importantly, the party must have known that in our ethnic context its political dominance would have manifested itself as ethnic, economic and social dominance. The belief that in such a toxic ethnic environment sufficient members of the other ethnicities would soon have seen where their material interests lay and migrate to the PPP/C, allowing us to live relatively happily together, was either a deliberate malicious effort at political aggrandizement or at best childish wishful thinking.
The fact that the PPP/C failed in its quest to dominate resulted from an intricate dialectical relationship between two factors: the internal contradictions of the concept of dominance and the fact that the ethnic nature of our society was changing. Indeed, as it turns out, the latter factor now creates a new opening for the PPP/C.
Firstly, the top leaders of the PPP/C and their associates may, as they say, have been ‘living the life’, but the stresses and strains of dominance – seemingly hopeless poverty, persistent crime and ethnic tension etc. – weighed heavily on the mass of people. So much so, that the 2014 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey indicated that 60% of its traditional supporters believed that the PPP/C did not care for them.
Secondly, my reading tells me that there now exists in our polity a sizeable ‘middle group’ consisting of the minor races and those of African, Indian and Amerindian ethnicity. Because of the largely exclusive nature of the other two major sub-cultures – Amerindian and Indian – those of African ethnicity make up the largest proportion of this group. But as a group these people are not hard wired to the PPP/C or the PNC as are the vast majority of Indians and Africans.
The PPP/C’s reign became as unacceptable to this group as it did to the others, and particularly the African component became highly mobilised and went for the coalition. Indeed, what this way of looking at the matter suggests is that since this group is not hard-wired to any political party, it will just as quickly turn from the current regime to the PPP/C if the coalition continues to make the blunders it is making – sloth in important policy delivery, numerous ministries and large ministerial salary increases, unresolved longstanding labour matters, etc. – and the PPP/C is able to transform itself.
The fear uppermost in many people’s minds when they consider the PPP/C in government again is that it will again attempt to utilise the numerical strength of its traditional supporters to entrench itself in government with all that entails. But the very existence of this volatile middle group able to change governments makes this if not impossible too risky and thus it is most unlikely that any political party will attempt to establish political dominance again.
This, however, says little about the other democratic virtues such as equity, participation and transparency, which are essential in an ethnically divided society such as ours. To sufficiently transform itself to deal with these issues, the PPP/C will have to do more than its present attempts to bully its way as if its recent past was without blemish.
The party would have to eschew and publicly recognise and explain its attempt to establish political dominance; the corruption, discrimination, etc. that resulted therefrom and demonstrate that it intends to build a deeply ethnically inclusive and equitable country. Generally, this means that it will have to formulate and sell a vision of its taking a path quite dissimilar from the one it has previously taken and signal in concrete ways that it intends to establish a democracy that contains all the necessary political virtues.
Internally, perhaps starting with its upcoming congress, the PPP/C will enhance this new vision if it is able to rid itself of allegiance to such archaic and undemocratic doctrines as ‘democratic centralism’, which always turns out to be more centralism that democratic. It will also need to become more internally inclusive and make its policy, electoral and financial arrangements far more open and transparent.
If the PPP/C is able to bite the bullet and modernise along the lines outlined here, I believe that it can become sufficiently politically acceptable to win in 2020.
