Guyana an elected dictatorship?

Oct 08, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
In a recent column, Freddie Kissoon asked whether Dr. Randy Persaud, “will leave me alone…Randy will be the Government’s answer to Freddie Kissoon. I have no problem with that… If Dr. Persaud obtains a wider readership than me, then so be it…All I asked is to be left alone to do my critiques of elected dictatorship in Guyana”.
It reminds me of another comment of his in a column last year attacking SN editors for publishing polls I had conducted. Freddie egoistically claimed that SN published the NACTA polls to get back at him because he quit his column at SN and went over to the Catholic Standard. But is that a fact? What is known is after Freddie was exposed about his “Doctor” misrepresentation in SN, the column was terminated unilaterally by the newspaper.
Now Freddie is misrepresenting the concept of an “elected dictatorship” which is not an original thought and is actually Freddie’s misappropriation. Anyone, including Randy, who is a Political Scientist like me, and with a passing familiarity with current events can write about “elected dictatorships”.
The term was coined by Lord Chancellor Hailsham of England to describe the brief governance of the Labour Party during the 1970s and is used in Political Science as a term of art (Freddie admits he did not study PoliSci since it does not exist as a discipline in the social sciences!!).
Hailsham was worried about the state in the Westminster system being dominated by the government of the day by controlling the parliamentary agenda with its majority of MPs and the ruling party always got its way because there were few restraints on it. Hence, the term, “elected or executive dictatorship”. But that is the nature of the parliamentary system – the majority party controls the state until the next election. If Freddie had the slightest acquaintance with political theory, he would know that Hailsham was not using the term literally.
A determination to act carry out its publicly exposed and debated manifesto (on the hustings and in Parliament) does not make a democratically elected government into a dictatorship. If the people don’t like the government, they can vote it out next election providing elections are free and fair and since 1992 elections in Guyana have been very credible. Hailsham was supportive of governments that won comfortable majorities in parliament and did not see them as “elective dictatorships” – he as an opponent of the government was merely being hyperbolic about the Labour government’s actions.
The greater the majority, the more representative was the government, according to him. Thus, Hailsham would not have supported Freddie’s argument of an “elective dictatorship” in Guyana – especially his incredible equating of the PPP government with the totalitarian Burnhamite state. On the contrary, Hailsham would say Guyana is very democratic under its elected leader. Like President Jagdeo, several other democratic leaders have been accused of being an elected dictator – Patrick Manning of T&T, Tony Blair of U.K, etc.
That is the nature of the office in a parliamentary system without some of the institutional checks and balances of the US model. But we should note that there are numerous formal and informal practices that keep parties from going overboard including in Guyana. Freddie seems to have forgotten that the present government did not create the constitution. It was handed down by a dictator. So far, none of the Presidents since 1992 has denied Guyanese fundamental democratic rights like freedom of religion and press, and basic foods. The last time I visited Guyana in July, I saw people eating roti, dhall, sardines, alou, sirni, malit, and they worshipped freely.
The press strongly criticises the elected government. Freddie viciously attacks the government daily often without evidence. The combined opposition pickets the governments and freely raises motions in parliament. This is not the hallmark of a dictatorship. It is a sign of a vibrant democracy.
To give credence to his theory of “elected dictatorship,” Freddie also erroneously invokes the name of CNN talk show host Fareed Zakaria, a Harvard educated political scientist who wrote on “Illiberal Democracy”. I doubt Zakaria would agree with Freddie that Guyana is an “elected dictatorship”. His work did (and does) not apply to Guyana. I should note that Zakaria sees some level of “dictatorship” in developing countries as necessary to promote and shape development. Thus, he was not very critical of some of the very oppressive dictatorships of Latin America and Asia. Zakaria felt without these dictatorships, those countries would not have experienced growth and development.
In fact, Zakaria believes that too much democracy is responsible for a lot of the world’s evils and he may even go so far to support the rise of a (benign) dictatorship in Guyana to clean up the destructive remnants of the Burnhamite system.
Zakaria claims that dictatorships have been far more successful than democracies in promoting economic growth, and he argues that economic wealth, accumulated during dictatorships, is critical for producing democracies.
In short, Zakaria is saying that successful democracies may have to go through dictatorships before becoming a stable democracy.
Is Freddie really proposing in a Freudian way that Jagdeo should become a dictator as proposed by Zakaria to “develop” our country.
Well, Guyana already suffered under an oppressive dictatorship for 28 years but experienced negative growth and as such has not been placed on a path for development, progress and democracy. But Clearly, Freddie’s mutilation of Zakaria’s political theory is not surprising since Freddie admits that he is not a political scientist like Randy and myself.
I urge Freddie to re-read the works of Lord Hailsham and Zakaria (slowly and repeatedly) and also seek guidance from political scientists to help him understand the usage of the specialised terms “elected dictatorship” and “illiberal democracy”.
Vishnu Bisram

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