Incumbency and dictatorship: A theory

Jul 25, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Mr. Ralph Ramkarran has suggested that the madness that has enveloped the PPP may be due to the long burden of incumbency. This is a commonly held perspective among political observers. When regimes hold power for so long, tiredness, mental fatigue, and persistent psychological confusion take a high toll. The pattern has a long existence in contemporary world politics.
In the case of Guyana, prolonged incumbency has not produced the characteristics normally associated with such types of power. In Guyana, the longer the PPP stays in power the more mentally energized it is. What breaks the pattern with the PPP is that whereas longevity in power results in a diluting of authoritarian behaviour, in Guyana, the PPP becomes more dictatorial. Is there an explanation?
We can start with President Forbes Burnham. As Burnham grew older in power, things began to fall apart but he became less tyrannical. After the WPA threat was dissolved Burnham mellowed. He was less autocratic and more accommodating. He began talks with the PPP about power-sharing and even made preparations for negotiating with the IMF.
Once Mrs. Thatcher tamed the unions, she became bored and lost contact with reality. Her party felt she was an electoral liability and removed her.
In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew began to open up after twenty years in power. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe agreed to power sharing after more than thirty years in office. The pattern can be clearly seen – protracted incumbency brings ineptitude and weariness but a lessening of authoritarianism.
The Guyana situation cries out for theoretical reformulation. There is no loss of mental energy in Luncheon even though his physical movements are greatly restricted.
There is no loss of mental energy in Gail Teixeira and Rohee and Ramotar even though they are getting on in age. If you examine the collective PPP after twenty-one years in power, the signs of fatigue are less visible than the signs of the autocratic mentality.
The theory I put forward here is the Stalinist culture that inheres in the PPP and explains why it gets more tyrannical as it gets older in power. This explains the break in the pattern.
Mrs. Thatcher, Le Kuan Yew, Forbes Burnham and other long-serving autocratic leaders were not influenced by Stalinist culture. Not so with the PPP leadership. Since the historic 2011 elections there are no signs of fatigue but a crass willingness to extend the tentacles of elected dictatorship.
I think when one is looking for an explanation for the madness in the PPP’s rule after twenty years of administration, one should go back to the shape Cheddi and Janet Jagan gave the PPP after the break with Forbes Burnham in the fifties.
The PPP is essentially a mixture of Stalinist politics, messianic culture and Indian racism. All three types of ideological structures reinforce the authoritarian instinct.
Stalinism is the opposite of liberal constitutionalism. It does not recognize the distribution of power. It conceives democracy as a bourgeois deception. Even if the 2011 election results went as follows, PPP 35, APNU 34 and AFC 31 giving the PPP the presidency with 35 percent of the vote, it would have still ruled with an iron fist conceding absolutely nothing.
This is how it understands power. If there are no intervening circumstances from now to 2016, the PPP will not rule any different as to when it had a parliamentary majority. Fatigue and exhaustion will not come into play.
Both Cheddi and Mrs. Jagan imbued PPP members with the culture of manifest destiny. Subsequent hierarchical PPP leaders after the death of their leaders labour in the belief that Guyana belongs to the PPP and the PPP has a natural right to rule. In other words, the world is wrong, history is wrong.
The PPP has always been right. History will vindicate its founder-leader Cheddi Jagan.
Finally, the PPP sees its raison d’ etre in Guyana as opposing the PNC in every conceivable way.
It will not save UG, it will not clean up Georgetown, it will not refurbish the Brickdam Independence Arch, it will not put the 1823 monument near to the Burnham Park at Parade Ground, it will not have a Public Service Appellate Tribunal, it will not spend money to upkeep the Square of the Revolution, it will not pour money into Linden.
All these things have some historical connection with the PNC and its founder leader, Forbes Burnham. Freud was at work when Ramotar at the last Heads of CARICOM meeting derecognized Forbes Burnham as one of the architects of Caribbean integration and asininely assigned that role to Cheddi Jagan.
In its zeal against the PNC, African Guyanese become prisoners of the game.

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