Credibility gap

Jun 26, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The media houses here have not assigned the importance that it deserves to the unsuccessful discussion between the President and Mr. Rickford Burke, Chairman of the Brooklyn-based Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID).

Despite Rickey Singh’s dismissal of it, and what PPP fans and the President’s supporters say about it, the CGID has been accorded recognition by Caribbean Governments with two CARICOM Prime Ministers receiving the CGID democracy award. Trinidad’s Patrick Manning travelled to New York to receive it.

After meeting with Mr. Burke last week during the CARICOM Heads meeting in New York, President Jagdeo told a press conference that the exchange with Burke was unproductive.

Let us leave the reason for the breakdown and look at what was the reaction of the President to the ongoing evaluation of the policies of the Guyana Government by the CGID.

Mr. Jagdeo accused Mr. Burke of labeling Guyana an ethnocracy (rule by ethnic domination). Mr. Jagdeo went on to describe Guyana as “a country that is deeply integrated.”

It is this statement that one should ask the President to expand on in the context of three situations – (1) continuing ethnic predomination of the membership of the PNC and PPP; (2) ongoing voting patterns among Africans and East Indians and; (3) PM Hinds’s justification for the state’s monopoly on radio.

The PPP is more than sixty years old yet it never had an African head or African deputy head and has always maintained a preponderance of East Indians in its central committee. The exact arithmetic obtains with the PNC.

Why if we are so deeply (the adverb used by the President) integrated have we not reached a stage where the leadership of both parties has an expression of 50/50 in terms of numbers of Africans and East Indians in their respective hierarchy?

The situation becomes more alarming when we think of the fantastic break with tradition in the US where a largely white party has chosen a Black candidate to be president.

Surely one would find it near to impossible to reject the opinion that the US is more racially integrated than Guyana given the Obama phenomenon.

As I remarked in my column on Tuesday, it has to be worrying that against the background of the frenetic insistence on the PPP and PNC that they are multi-racial parties, you never (yes, never) see the leaders of the PPP enjoying themselves at the National Park during African Emancipation Day.

And you never see the executive members of the PNC having a gay time at the Indian celebration (at the very National Park) of Arrival Day. Can such a country be referred to as profoundly integrated? Maybe integrated but surely not deeply.

What about voting patterns? We can move away from normative conclusions and look at statistics. Only the 1964 elections, before 1992, contained valid scientific data about how people voted. We therefore have to use the data from 1992.

There has been no election from 1992, including the 1992 poll, where a distinct pattern of racial voting was not present.

The hard, cold, brutal statistics of all national elections reveal that a majority of PNC votes came from African Guyanese and East Indians chose the PPP.

A slight variation occurred in 2006 where Africans departed from that tradition but East Indians maintained their historical approach.

We must juxtapose this with Obama’s victory where as many whites voted for Mr. Obama as they did for Mrs. Clinton.

Can Guyana be classified as a profoundly integrated land when people shockingly and deliberately accept a race motivation when they cast their ballots in national elections?
Wouldn’t it have been history in the making if the PNC had romped home in Berbice at the last election?

Wouldn’t it have been a prodigious and phenomenal achievement if the PPP had devastated the PNC in Georgetown, especially south Georgetown in the August 2006 balloting? Why can’t we see that Obama-like gravitation in Guyana?

The answer is because we are bitterly divided along ethnic lines. It is the only game Guyanese know and can play.

Finally, it would be fascinating to hear President Jagdeo’s take on the Sam Hinds analysis as to why the Government must maintain the radio monopoly.

Mr. Hinds reminded us that we are not ready for the use of privately owned radio stations because look what radio did in Rwanda.

Any schoolboy will tell you that by the Rwanda reference, he means that private radio will be used for racial incitement. It would seem that the PM is conceding that people will buy the extremists’ diatribes.

Why should they when President Jagdeo says that if you go to the clubs you will see the races intermingling and we are a deeply integrated land? Seems to me there is a credibility gap in the Government of Guyana.

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