Bullyism

May 01, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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As expected, Mr Ogunseye’s “riot act” speech at BV stirred up a hornet’s nest of protest at his call for Africans “to fight and bring Guyana to a halt” unless their representatives were included in a “national government” if the PPP won the upcoming elections.
Coming from an individual that had defended the gunmen operating out of post-2002 Buxton (who had massacred innocent children and burnt a crippled wheelchair-bound old man) as “resistance fighters”, it was not difficult to understand the fears aroused by the threat. And it was not just the memories of the gruesome recent past: we are again seemingly in the throes of another tide of criminal violence.
But what was even more troubling was the response by those who essentially supported Mr Ogunseye’s call to action – notably Mr Sherwood Lowe and Dr David Hinds. Not their support, per se, but their studied refusal to situate the call beyond the stark demands of their constituency. The concerns of other constituencies were not even given short shrift. Mr Lowe, for instance, complains: “If we propose that, all things considered, shared governance is the only viable option in a society such as ours, the idea is attacked…”
But the fact of the matter is that Mr. Oguyense was not merely “proposing” shared governance: he was exhorting Africans to come out into the streets to bring any possibly newly-elected PPP government down to its knees to accept “shared governance” or else!
To make matters clear, he went on to assure Africans that the Disciplined Forces, dominated by their kith and kin, would not intervene. Why would there be a need for the Disciplined Forces to intervene if the action contemplated was just peaceful protests with armbands in place and all that? This seems to me a throwback to the crude bullyism of the PNC when they had elements of the GDF march through the streets of certain villages so as to bully the inhabitants into submission.
Mr Ogunseye and his partisans are also declaring: “my way or no other way” but disingenuously phrasing the threat as “my way because there is the only way for justice for all”. Apart from the explicit bullyism, this is a false dilemma. But even before that, there are those that have disputed the factual premises of those that are demanding shared governance: to wit that, in the words of Dr. Hinds, “psychological, economic, cultural and political violence (are being) perpetrated on African Guyanese”.
On Easter Sunday I was in a most racially mixed gathering near the sea wall, when I raised the charge of governmental discrimination against Africans. A miffed Indian supporter of the PPP bitterly demanded if I had looked at the list of awardees of Cuban medical scholarships. It appears that his daughter had been turned down even though he asserted she was qualified. For years I have been calling for the opposition to provide the evidence of what is an eminently empirical matter. But I guess the absence of hard data supplies the best environment for incendiary charges.
But back to the false dilemma: shared governance or the “internal colonization of Africans” (Hinds). There have been other models proposed to address the putative contradictions of our ethnically charged polity beyond that of the sharing of ministries envisaged by “shared governance”. At a minimum, there’s the “inclusive governance” of the PPP and the “Federalism” of ROAR: it’s not one or the other. Then again, no one has explained to me how, under our present demographics where Indians are (even a decade ago, and now more so) a minority of 43% compared to the combined African/Coloured bloc of 49%, the opposition do not now have the advantage in a majoritorian electoral system.
Over the past five years, I have bemoaned the refusal of the opposition to reach out to Indians -in an era when the latter are historically most disillusioned with the PPP. But not only have they not done this: they have absolutely neglected to organise their traditional base and remain locked in their middle class enclaves. The stridency of those that clamour for shared governance as the only option for Guyana, offers a free-pass to the opposition on the question of addressing Indian concerns, which I have proposed are fundamentally about their physical insecurity.
I was very disappointed that Messrs Lowe and Hinds did not even allude to the latter fears after Mr Ogunseye explicitly conceded my argument on the basis of the Indian Security Dilemma – that African dominated Forces would cleave to their kith and kin if push comes to shove. But I was not surprised. This was the lack of contextualisation of their support for Mr Ogunseye’s “riot act” call that I alluded to earlier.
Assuming that shared government addresses the African Security Dilemma – they get seats in the Executive even though the opposition absolutely refuse to do the hard, quotidian, tedious house-to-house mobilisation to pip the PPP based on the demographics – what about Indian fears? If Africans cannot trust an Indian dominated government to do well by them, why should Indians trust African-dominated Disciplined Forces to do the right thing?

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