Politics in Guyana

Nov 27, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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I first offered the following analysis of our voting proclivities in 1992 and then before every subsequent election. Its thesis has never been disproved. What will be the verdict this time?
“Whatever their faults, our parties, like parties everywhere, do not merely affect, they also reflect the nuances of their societies.  So the fault, dear friends, if there is any, might also lie in ourselves.  Politicians cannot lead followers wherever the politicians want them to go, for followers will only go in directions they find preferable to the alternatives available. Leaders can catalyze but not initiate ethnic reactions.”
Political parties arose in a Europe that had already “solved” its ethnic problem by transforming it from a national question into an international one.  The people in each state were more or less one ethnic group, with minorities that “go along to get along”.  These countries had completed their national revolutions to form nations out of diverse peoples and were moving onto their participatory revolution or democratization, where subjects would become citizens with the right to choose their governors.  Their welfare revolution, focusing on economic justice, was down the road.
We in Guyana, like many other states in the post World War II era, were forced to confront all three revolutions simultaneously.  What was our experience?  Our politicians elided the “national question” even though we were an almost textbook case of a plural society.  They focused on participation and welfare, but even here ignored the need to modify our political institutions.  Their mobilization produced an ethnic party system which is qualitatively different from that of homogeneous societies on which it was modeled.
In the former, the party competition is on a single axis – ethnicity, while in the latter, there are many crosscutting axes – class, religion, region [rural-urban], etc.  In an ethnic party system the ethnic axis of competition controls the parties’ formation, survival and competition.  In homogeneous societies many individuals vote for parties depending on the parties’ stand on issues.  Since all parties have to court this bloc of “swing” votes, the parties’ positions tend to converge and preclude extreme positions.
In ethnically divided societies such as Guyana, voters gravitate to the two ends of the competition axis depending on their ethnic origins.  The party’s stand on issues becomes almost irrelevant since it is supported solely as a protector of the group’s interest. This type of voting is not necessarily irrational; the simultaneously ongoing welfare revolution gives hope that the economic demands of the ethnic vote may be satisfied if “his” party secures power.
The PPP began as a true multiethnic party even though it espoused a socialist non-ethnic line, i.e., its members encompassed the main competing ethnic groups and the leadership was seen to represent these sections.  The split of the PPP into PPP [Jagan], and PPP [Burnham], subsumed into ethnicity the incipient urban – rural, middle class – lower class dichotomies.  The disintegration of the PPP was not only the result of leadership egos: the reasons go to the extreme difficulty in maintaining multiethnic parties into plural societies. It is important to note the ethnic party system emerged contrary to the wishes of the leaders, Jagan and Burnham.  While there were several reasons for this eventuality the most salient was pressure from members of each constituency on their respective leaders to go it alone.
After an ethnic party system is formed, multiethnic parties are even more difficult to sustain.  The greatest pressure arising from “flank” parties or groups which inevitably arise to “secure” ethnic rights.  They take strong ethnic positions driving the erstwhile “multiethnic” party to respond in order to retain its base.  The results are the incompatible group claims.  In this system the competition is not between the two ethnic parties, but with their flank parties or groups. From the voter’s perspective, there is a great stigma in voting for the party of the “other” ethnic group; one would be branded a traitor.

Another major reason for the lack of successful multiethnic parties is the difficulty of producing a multiethnic leadership structure which has the confidence of the various ethnic groups.  The “iron law of oligarchy”, i.e. that power inevitably accretes in a small elite within any organizations, is perceived to operate.  In Guyana, the fear is that one ethnic group would dominate and that the other ethnic leaders would be mere tokens.
In Guyana then, the party system comprises of two ethnically dominated parties, the PPP and PNC (now APNU) at two ends of the axis, with other parties attempting to be multiethnic. The AFC is attempting the most difficult feat of all – to be a non-ethnic party, i.e., having a non-ethnic ideology, membership from all ethnic sections and leadership which does not secure their position by representing particular ethnic interests.  The problem is that such a party takes itself out of the prime axis of competition and their support is confined to that percentage of the populace that has abandoned reflexive ethnic voting.  Or those who can read into the leadership structure or policies etc. and find an ethnic orientation.

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