Election season in Guyana has always been that time that rolls around, every couple of years, when neighbourliness can get suspended and tensions rise, when political parties set out to demonstrate why they are the best thing since sliced bread, and why their main political opponent is the absolute worst choice.
This is amplified because of our fraught political history, and the ways in which since the fateful split of the PPP in the 1950s, race has historically shaped support for, and perceptions of the PPP and the PNC (the latter now the main ‘partner’ in APNU). Decades ago, political scientist Ralph Premdas wrote about how these two political parties would say the right thing in public meetings, while in smaller and informal bottom house gatherings they would resort to racial appeals.
In recent times, we have seen how this plays out on the campaign trail, with Indo-Guyanese APNU supporters being deemed traitors in the 2015 elections that removed the PPP from office (neemakharam was a word tossed around, for example), and in this election season, with retired Brigadier Mark Phillips being dismissed as some sort of token, a cynical attempt to win Black votes (witness Joe Harmon’s recent comments at a Buxton meeting).
In last week’s diaspora column, political scientist Percy Hintzen underlines how political support in Guyana has come to “rest blindly, not on personal and national well-being and social and cultural dignity, but on absolute fealty to a racial political leadership. Political, economic, social, and cultural degradation mattered little in the face of such obedience.”
Degradation on the campaign trail is the key word. And it is sickening.
Just last week, reports surfaced of a meeting at Kitty Market Square of APNU executive, PNCR Chair and Minister of Public Health Volda Lawrence calling on supporters to show up at polling stations after they have closed: “At 6 o clock, you return to work at the places of polling and you will remain out there and let our staff inside know you are out there … Comrades, you have to remain there until they get it right, until they have counted all ballots and the returning officer comes outside and paste up the statement of polls and then our nice strong men will be mobilised to follow that ballot box for it to go into that container and have the APNU+AFC padlock and chain placed on that container to protect our ballots.”
And just a day or two ago, at a PPP rally in Little Diamond, Clement Rohee, long time PPP activist and past Minister of Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs in the PPP administration,
found it fit to entertain the gathering with the following remarks: “But you know, as you drive down the road you see all these green flags all over the place…and these flags you have the symbol of the APNU/AFC. What’s the symbol of the APNU/AFC…the palm with the key on the green flag. The palm key. And if you tek out the ‘A’ from the ‘P’, if you tek out the ‘A’ and you leff only the ‘P’ and you put in a ‘O’ instead of the ‘A’, and you leff the key, tell me what you get. Now this is school time, we back to school, this is back to school time. I don’t want you all to actually say what it is but I think you know what I’m talking about…Do you get something that you could hold on to? I talking to the men. The President of the United States, Mr. Bush, sorry Mr. Trump, he say grab something….”
Volda Lawrence and Clement Rohee –senior functionaries of their respective parties who were at different points in our political history, entrusted with ministerial portfolios to address the security, physical and mental wellbeing of the population – can join hands and go to the top of the class when it comes to dog whistles for racial and sexual violence. They are opposite sides of the same tawdry coin.
On the one hand we have Lawrence encouraging APNU/AFC supporters to possibly contravene the Representation of the People Act, which, as a Stabroek News editorial pointed out, “outlaws any unauthorized person obstructing or interfering with access to, or egress from, a polling place or the movement of documents, supplies and other material pertaining to an election, including ballot boxes and ballot papers.” In the context of an election campaign where emotions run high, and where race sadly continues to play a large role in structuring how the two main political contenders are seen, this is, to put it mildly, an irresponsible and dangerous invitation (plus, frankly speaking, given the PNC’s history of electoral rigging, one wonders how on earth Lawrence would not understand that such remarks stand to reinforce a sense that the lion’s spots haven’t changed, coalition or no coalition?). Imagine if the PPP – there are other parties to be sure, but we know that this is who Lawrence is implicitly invoking as the bogeyman in her call – were to do the same (and thankfully they have explicitly told their supporters to go home after they have voted). What might we expect? And when – not if – violence were to break out as a result, who would bear the brunt of it? Not the ones from on high who always stand to benefit the most from such division and animosity.
On the other hand, we have Rohee entertaining PPP supporters with supposedly humorous remarks that are sexually degrading in order to score a few cheap points. We live in a country where such vulgarity rules. We live in a country where it is okay to reduce the governing coalition to female genitalia and make jokes about men grabbing women (according to Rohee’s comments, since the US president talks about grabbing something, presumably the Guyanese men he specifically addresses should have no problem doing the same). The message is clear. To be associated with being seen as female is not a good thing. Why else would Rohee say what he said, why would this be seen as something funny? Real men look at and grab women with impunity. So the real strong man in this dogfight is the PPP, and APNU/AFC is the word with the ‘O’ substituted for the ‘A.’ True thing does pass in joke. The day after this meeting in Little Diamond, in Saturday’s newspaper, Guyanese woke up to headlines like this: A mother of six in Cane Grove stabbed to death, and a man in Bushlot chopped his wife and then took his own life. We are facing an epidemic of violence targeting women across our country and region, in fact we are facing a national and regional emergency on this matter, and yet it seems that some of our politicians believe it is okay to stand on political platforms and make jokes like this.
We need to call this for what it is in both cases. This behaviour is what supposed leaders are modelling on political platforms, when they are asking for your vote to represent you for the next five years. This is the example they are setting for youth, for all Guyanese. This, in a country where in the past few weeks there have been reports of school violence, reports ranging from a student who may lose part of his sight after being attacked, to another student taken to hospital and where the teacher who attempted to address the incident was then physically set upon by the angry parents of the child who committed the offence, to the most recent report of a young schoolgirl stabbed in the back with a knife by another student.
Whipping up the political base by appealing to racial fears and by denigrating women may translate into votes, but what is lost in the longer term? And what kind of contempt does it show for the ordinary voter, that political campaigns believe these indecent and violent shortcuts are really the only language that their supporters can understand?
As Percy Hintzen noted in his column last week on oil, the stakes of this coming election couldn’t be higher. Perhaps that helps explain this level of awfulness on the campaign trail. But precisely because the stakes are so high, precisely because the issues before us are so significant, precisely because we stand to repeat our past, one that condemns most Guyanese to an ongoing precarious existence while the few benefit (including and especially those who promise us the world on the campaign trail), it is high time and beyond time that Guyanese make our voices heard loud and clear.
We should be suspicious of political parties and leaders who seem capable only of condemning the other side. We know them because they are quick to write letters to the papers and to carry on with righteous indignation at their meetings and to post all kinds of long hypocritical messages on their social media pages. Yet their words and voices dry up when it comes to calling out what is going on right in their own backyard. Complete silence then. Shame. We need to call them out without fear or favour. The late social activist Andaiye had coined a term a few years ago in relation to a Jamaican campaign against sexual violence: “Touch one, touch all.” She had also penned an open letter in 2004, in response to the racial violence that broke out on the Guyanese coast, titled “Not in my name.” These are words we should carefully heed, as we head into the final month of the election campaign trail.
