Flawed Premises

May 08, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Dr. David Hinds responded to my article of last week, “Bullyism”. Tacuma Ogunseye had urged African Guyanese to “fight and bring Guyana to a halt” to guarantee their representatives a share of executive power. In supporting Ogunseye’s call, Dr. Hinds had ignored the implications of what could be called Ogunseye’s Corollary. To wit, when Africans came out into the streets, the African-dominated army would not take any action against their kith and kin. This, of course, formed the basis of what I had labelled “The Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma”, which acts to channelize Indian political behaviour in a defensive mode.
Hinds was only concerned, I pointed out, about what I defined over twenty years ago as “The African Ethnic Security Dilemma”. As a minority ethnic group in a polity that voted along ethnic lines in the main, Africans could be locked out of the executive in perpetuity. Dr. Hinds ignored my assertion that demographic changes since have made the African Dilemma moot. The Coloured/ Mixed population had voted with the African bloc following the riots of the sixties. The last census (2002), I pointed out, showed that Indians were down to 43% versus the 47% of African/Coloured constituency and 9% Amerindians. Indians would be even less by now. Who are now the minority?
What I have been warning for the past five years or so is that in the opposition parties continuing to argue that they are structurally rather than contingently locked out of the executive, they have created a self-fulfilling prophecy that they have to resort to “extra-parliamentary” action to rectify the situation. Their flawed premise, in a nutshell, becomes tragically “outcome determinative”.
Dr. Hinds reminds us that he and other Africans (certainly from the WPA) struggled against the PNC. Their form of struggle, one would hope, was determined by the nature of that regime: I have always maintained that Dr Rodney was no adventurist. Burnham had created a militarised, police-state dictatorship that precluded peaceful regime change by additionally (for good measure) massively rigging elections.
In the post-PNC era, Indians also struggled against the PPP for new governance and state structures that would include Africans. Following up its conceptualisation of the African and Indian Ethnic Security Dilemmas by 1988, ROAR, the Indian party, campaigned from 2000 for a “Government of National Unity” (GNU). I further remind Dr. Hinds that the PNC, the party of Africans, rejected this approach and Mr Hoyte publicly castigated ROAR for being fixated on “race”. In Parliament between 2001 and 2006, ROAR was consistently the only party that called for a GNU: the Hansard records can be checked.
ROAR proposed that a GNU, as in South Africa, could then move on to discuss, debate and formulate more appropriate and permanent governance and state structures for Guyana. Our proposal was, and remains, Federalism. Even after Mr Hoyte’s Damascene conversion to “shared governance” in 2002, the PNC still focused on winning it all. We saw this play out in their equivocation on the Buxton gunmen. Indians were not amused and ROAR paid the price for sticking with a recalcitrant opposition.
After experiencing the massive demographic changes during the 2006 elections campaign, I became convinced that the opposition could win subsequent elections by an absolute majority. And if they were serious about “shared governance”, they would have the legitimacy to implement it. They had to satisfy two conditions however: firstly, be united and secondly , address the Indian Security Dilemma. They have refused to do either, and now disingenuously read the riot act for shared governance.
Dr Hinds scoffs that if ROAR could not wean away Indian votes, how could an African-dominated opposition accomplish this task? A number of things to note. Firstly, ROAR played a historic role in publicly arguing that Indians, as Indians, could vote against the PPP. The ice is broken. Secondly, the opposition, based on the new demographics, do not need a massive Indian swing to counter the PPP’s courting of the Amerindian votes. Thirdly, ROAR was never assessed as capable of winning an election – even the dissatisfied Indian voter rationally saw them as a gesture of protest but more to the point, “splitting the vote” to ensure a new government that would refuse to address their concerns. A combined opposition after 2006 was considered capable of winning, and with the dissatisfied Indian ranks swollen as never before, could have enticed enough of them to tip the scales.
This is not going to happen in 2011, because Indians will correctly interpret their inevitable late wooing by the opposition as opportunistic and deceptive. But all is not lost for the opposition. Constitutionally, they do not need 50%+ to win the elections and the Presidency – all they need is a plurality. The PPP, if I understand the opposition right, can only count on the support of the 43% (now way below 40%) Indians that will vote for them, because they (Indians) are inveterate racists. Not rational actors trapped by their (unaddressed) Ethnic Security Dilemma. (To be continued)

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