Post-Jagan PPP

Apr 07, 2009 Editorial

For some years now, there has been intense speculation about who from within the PPP’s hierarchy might emerge as the party’s Presidential candidate for the 2011 elections.
The conjectures are not just confined to political aficionados but also to the man-in-the-street. This is probably so because it is widely conceded that the PPP’s political dominance is unlikely to be seriously challenged soon, and that its Presidential candidate will consequently have a major role in shaping the policies of Guyana for the next decade. The passing of the “matriarch” of the party, former President Janet Jagan, has only served to raise the speculations into a veritable frenzy.

There are some who believe that Mrs. Jagan’s departure will lead to debilitating infighting among the top contenders.
This apprehension might have even percolated into the leadership core of the PPP itself since it found it necessary to hold a press conference last week, remarkable not for its subject matter – the party’s commitment to national unity – but for its unprecedented array of the party’s Executive and Central Committee members deployed for the event.

It was obviously an attempt to allay fears about fissionist tendencies.
This is an understandable move in terms of demonstrating to the country that the PPP has an institutional structure in place to ensure leadership continuity and presumably less disruptive policy changes for the country.
However, it cannot be gainsaid that all institutions have to work through living, breathing human beings and so the question as to who might be the individual at the helm of the PPP’s list at the next general elections is not irrelevant.

The Jagans, as founders of the PPP, sought to minimise the possibility of individual idiosyncrasies dictating the party’s policies by always articulating an overarching ideological stance that set the outer parameters of leadership “innovations”. That stance, however, was flexible enough to cover the party’s positions – “socialist”- under a colonial administration, years in the political wilderness – an avowedly “communist party” and finally a pragmatic “Marxist” party that would deal with the neo-liberal dispensation following its return to power in 1992.
Its refusal to expunge the last label from its self-definition in the face of even internal challenge at various party Congresses, has to be very significant. Any aspirant to the top position of the PPP must be willing to state where he or she stands on the question of ideology.

There can be no resort to the banality propounded over the last two decades that “ideology” is irrelevant. Even the “masters of finance” who pushed that particular bit of nostrum – “neo-liberals” who universalised their ideology – have had to eat humble pie and accept that capitalism as it now stands has to be altered.
That implies, at the very least, modifying it from some particular perspective – and that’s “ideology”. Even the Europeans are now thumbing their noses at the unregulated, free-for-all Anglo-American capitalism and accepting that unrestrained greed cannot form the basis of any social order.
It soon ceases to be an “order”.

One would hope therefore that if the present leadership corps of the PPP wants to really ensure continuity, they have a golden opportunity to do so by crafting an exposition of their views on what are their guiding principles in the context of both the loss of their last “founder leader” and the global financial crisis. If unbounded greed and avarice – which we seem to have embraced with obscene haste of recent – will not do, then what is the alternative?

The ad-hoc approach to building a viable nation has worked nowhere and will not work here: least so in the areas of society, economics and politics.
If this is done, the entire nation will breathe a bit easier that whoever emerges as the PPP’s next Presidential candidate: we would have a sense of where he/she would be “coming from”. While, unquestionably, leaders will lend their personal touch to guiding principles, at least the ordinary citizen will know when they are “straying”.

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Post-Jagan PPP

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Post-Jagan PPP

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