Dear Editor,
I am heartened to see that His Excellency, President David Granger has returned from successful medical treatment overseas and is doing well. While we are informed that his personal prognosis is overwhelmingly positive, as unfortunately happens in the wake of serious illness, secondary maladies are revealed and opportunistic infections arise, in this instance not with regard to his person but on the body politic of which he is the most pivotal part.
With regard to opportunistic pathologies, the not unpredictable manifestation came in the form of Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo’s no confidence motion. To not have been prepared for Mr. Jagdeo is to be oblivious to two fundamental things. The first is the basic intrinsically adversarial nature of Guyana’s current political system – as one peerless young lawmaker so eloquently put it sixty years ago during the 1958 budget debate,
“The duty on this side of the Chamber is not to indulge in platitudes and promises to support the government when any measure for the benefit of the country comes up; that goes without saying. It is the main duty of the “opposition”, as I see it, in spite of the paranoiac tendencies of the present Government, to expose every flaw of Government and to show the people where the Government has fallen down.”
That was one of Mr. Jagdeo’s predecessors as then Leader of the Opposition, Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham. The second fundamental thing being apparently ignored is the unique combination that Mr. Jagdeo embodies, one that underlines a propensity towards the more rabid extreme of that adversarial structure – Mr. Jagdeo is a figure with an undeniably historical role but who is himself absent of any true sense of personal historicity. There are multiple proofs of this but perhaps none so self-evident in his inability to produce any representative opus of his political philosophy, in direct contrast to those who have so far occupied the seat of executive president. President Granger has written and published extensively even before his political career, and Burnham, Hoyte, the Jagans and even Donald Ramotar have – with varying quality – added to a discernible, published, thematically categorical canon of presidential thought. In contrast, Mr. Jagdeo’s promise to relax, travel and write in his now abortive retirement has not borne any documented intellectual fruit.
Why this is important to note is that it belies the fiction that Mr. Jagdeo is this adversarial Goliath with whom the coalition has to struggle, a fiction in which he is perpetually framed. What the opposition leader is, when he is not a living, breathing Ozymandias atop a fast sinking pedestal in the centre of our current political desert, is that he is the enfant terrible of our collectively created dysfunctional history, the embodiment of our congenital bickering, pettiness, greed, tribalism, cynicism and distrust of each other, our self-inflicted sins made flesh. In this, he is not at fault in the grand sense, he is without true agency, the social equivalent of a natural phenomenon, a combination of barometrical and ecological circumstance. Within our present sociopolitical landscape, some manifestation of Bharrat Jagdeo would be inevitable were this one no longer here.
As is often the case with such disasters, we have before us the choices of migration or mitigation. We have tried the latter for the past half-century, putting up temporary structures – the Carter formula, tepid constitutional reform, the Cummingsburg Accord – and we have seen the critical limits of each in the wake of subsequent storms, including the latest onslaught from Mr. Jagdeo.
To return to the original metaphor, complemented and agitated by the opportunistic pathology was the systemic infirmity that was exposed in the APNU+AFC administration. It makes no practical sense for my purposes to add further dimension to the diagnoses offered on what other commentators have identified as the chronic condition of the coalition. What I will say is that at this historical juncture (a theme that warrants an amplification impossible within the constraints of this intervention) we have an over-abundance of evidence that our present political environment is too precarious, too dysfunctional, too unstable as to be sustainable both at present and within the radical new future that awaits us.
This is where we have to move beyond grand rhetoric and into direct, practical solutions. I say nothing new when I say that the winner-take-all approach to governance is intrinsically, by sheer force of basic logic, undemocratic. A political party, having gained 51 percent of the vote in a plural society, being that able to claim 100 percent of the executive portfolio is a formula for precisely the sort of dysfunctional hegemonic politics that have plagued us since independence.
The absence of a workable formula for shared governance has, in my mind, had more to do with the lack of political will born of both distrust and myopia than it has to do with any actual improbability of a practicable configuration. Nothing, for example, prevented the principle of executive proportionality having been included in the last constitution reform process of almost two decades ago, meaning the creation of a constitutional mechanism where a president elect is mandated to offer and accept the submission from the opposition to fill a minimum to maximum range of junior ministries in key sectors based upon the results of the general elections.
In such a scenario, the president elect would be obligated to offer the parliamentary opposition the opportunity to fill a maximum of six and a minimum of three junior portfolios, let’s say health, education, energy, infrastructure, culture and local government, of course within a defined period. A government that secures a plurality but not a majority (under 50%) would be mandated to offer the maximum of six portfolios; a government that secures from 51-55 percent of the vote, five portfolios; a government that secures 56-60 percent, four portfolios; and a government that secures 61 percent and above, the minimum of three portfolios.
The executive would retain control of the budget through the exclusive occupation of the finance portfolio, cabinet cohesion and confidentiality are maintained while the opposition, as supported by the will of the people, are afforded a meaningful say in the executive. Building upon that basic principle, we can easily – if the interest of the country were paramount in our consideration – significantly reform the Constitution and transform our political culture.
In closing, as we approach 2020, we cannot continue to kick the can down the road when it comes to a transformative approach to governance and citizenship in Guyana. To borrow a construction from Mr. Burnham, when it comes to this issue, we innovate or we perish, having squandered our last great opportunity to get this society right.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
