Democracy in Guyana

Oct 06, 2008 Editorial

Sixteen years have now elapsed since the historic free and fair elections of October 5th 1992. This seismic event ended an era of corrupted electoral arrangements that witnessed the evisceration of the legitimacy of most of our political institutions. We were unique, however, neither in the authoritarian nature of our pre-1992 rule nor its abrupt end: the beginning of the nineties was categorized as the “third wave of democracy” by one much respected scholar of international politics.

Since those heady days, there have been some who have questioned the quality of our democracy and a handful have even asserted that we have retrogressed to the bad old days of the very absence of democracy.

This is as it ought to be since in any agglomeration of humans it is impossible for there to be complete unanimity on any one issue – including the nature of the regime under which they are governed. But what are the facts of the matter?

Right up front we all have to acknowledge that democracy is an omnibus term that can cover a wide array of expectations: we can, for instance, look at democracy descriptively, normatively, analytically, rationalistically and even polemically.

Unfortunately, most of the present critics prefer to be polemical in their critiques, which then inevitably descend into caviling criticisms that go against the grain of positive democratic debate and discourse. Even their possibly valid points become clouded in the intemperate language.

Democracy is not like a radio that can be turned on and off with the switch of a button or, to bring the analogy closer home, the scratch of a pen on a ballot paper. While free and fair elections, held at agreed periodic intervals may be the sine qua non of a democratic government, this empirical or descriptive focus has been criticized, validly in our estimation, as conflating a procedural aspect of democracy with democracy’s more important substantive aspects.

The retort of the empiricists, of course, is to point out the dangers of the slippery slope that one embarks on in attempting to decide what exactly ought to be the contents of “democracy” whether determined rationalistically or otherwise.

But in our own certain circumstances, it is certainly not asking too much to expect that the critics of the contents of our empirically defined democracy should accept that in 1992, we were at a minimum, only at the beginning of a transition of a democracy – defined by whatever criteria that they may find desirable and as not being present now in their estimation.

In other words, that since what preceded 1992 was not a democracy; the substantive aspects of democracy would have had to be constructed afterwards.

The question, which is studiously evaded by the critics, then arises as to who – whether individuals or institutions or both, was to be responsible for that construction of substantive democracy in Guyana. The premise of the critics is that this is the sole responsibility of the government of the day.

However, when one surveys the few countries that have successfully made the transition since 1990 from authoritarian rule to, say a democracy defined by “rule of law” or other liberal substantive values, one finds that the opposition and civil society played equally important roles.

If the opposition, for instance, does not operate on an explicit (as did Spain) or implicit “democratic covenant” with the government, which includes the legitimacy of the rules of political contestation – especially the electoral rules – the transition is almost certain to be slowed down if not stymied.

The situation becomes even direr if the democratically elected government becomes challenged via extra-parliamentary routes. For any democratic transition to be successful there must be a responsible opposition.

Civil society also has a crucial role to play in the inculcation of broader democratic values into a transition society as was seen in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

In the Guyanese pre-1992 era, there was a systematic subversion of civic organizations such as religious bodies and the plethora of institutions that offered different views and paradigms to the citizenry, which enriches the credentials of any democratic polity.

It is the responsibility of all the citizens of the country, including the critics, to work in rebuilding the vibrancy of those civil organizations that form the scaffolding of any functioning democracy.

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Democracy in Guyana

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