Post-Carifesta autocracy

Aug 31, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I could never understand, and will never, why an educated mind would descend to the level of ignorance so that it provides a fertile field for fascist growth.

After the Great Depression, the fear of insecurity took hold of all Germans and Hitler was able to exploit the harshness of the Versailles Treaty.

Even if Hitler offered paradise, educated Germans could not be so gullible not to see that he was a killing machine. But they stood behind him until he became civilization’s worst product.

There has to come a time when people with intelligent minds have to see through the deception of leaders they support. Such an awakening is now happening in the US.

The alienation from Mr. Bush is almost complete. We here in Guyana have seen where a leader’s constituents finally withdrew their patronage after the destruction became ubiquitous.

The African middle class nurtured the PNC and brought Forbes Burnham into their pantheon. He was their chosen one, a logical choice in a country of competing ethnic groups. Not only was Mr. Burnham smart and learned but his opposition was politically effete and irrelevant.

After a decade and a half of power, the African middle class had given up on Burnham. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. They gave Burnham absolute power and in the process created a dictator.

Given their good breeding and the educated world they lived in, the African middle class was capable of reason and reason prevailed when they chose Walter Rodney in preference to Burnham.

The major weakness was not Burnham only. It was power. Once power is possessed for so long, it saps the rationality of its holders.

Burnham had too much power for too long and democracy went out of the window. Guyana was saved because the African middle class took an educated decision.

In Guyana, by the time the 2011 national election comes, the ruling party would have been nineteen years in power. The current president has already completed two terms in the Caribbean context of prime ministership.

Has power been possessed for too long in Guyana by the PPP Government? The answer is a resounding yes. Yet one is not seeing the awakening among educated East Indians as in the early eighties when the African middle class revolted against Burnham’s totalitarian rule.

But the facts are so graphically compelling. There is a declining democracy in Guyana to the point where it has disappeared and has been replaced by elected dictatorship.

I remember speaking to a former leading diplomat in the Burnham and Hoyte Governments, Ronald Austin. I always remember what he told me Burnham told him, which he said he will never forget.

The year was 1983. Guyana’s economy had collapsed and the Government was very unpopular. There was widespread talk in intellectual circles in the PNC that the time had come for a change of government. Mr. Burnham summoned some of the young theorists in his party and said to them: “So you want a change in government. You think you know the PPP.

Those people are a mind-set.” Austin intoned that because he has seen what the PPP has been like for sixteen years; those words of Burnham will forever ring in his ears.

From my studies of Burnham, I suspected he knew there was something inherently wrong with the PPP as a group of politicians. But my studies revealed that he was not alone in such a wise assessment.

Quite a number of businessmen in the sixties deeply believed that the PPP was a seriously flawed association of communist politicians and could never have had any relationship with them.

As Carifesta goes into its final day, the fear will grow that after its completion, there will be a hardening of the autocratic instinct.

This has been the pattern since Cricket World Cup 2007. After each major international event, one detects a chauvinistic, arrogant dismissal of any type of accommodating politics from the Office of the President.
The President met with the combined opposition in November 2006.

Cricket World Cup followed three months after and it took a massacre at Lusignan in January 2008 before the President officially met with national stakeholders together in one meeting.

After the Rio Summit and the Commonwealth Finance Ministers Conference, a series of attitudinal displays from the Government took the country further down the path of dictatorship.

One can therefore expect post-Carifesta political bullying. Armed with the success of the event, the illusions and delusions of grandeur will no doubt impact on policy-making.

One suspects with the reconvening of Parliament, Bills will be rushed through with contemptuous disregard for the views of the opposition members.

No doubt the Commissioner of Police will be confirmed. After Carifesta, elected dictatorship will march on.