Why problems persist in the PPP

Jul 28, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The People’s Progressive Party is facing a plethora of persistent problems. The Party was forced to mount an intense campaign to convince its constituents that it’s twice-postponed 30th Congress, now due to be held at J.C. Chandisingh Secondary School, in Port Mourant, Corentyne, from 2nd-4th August, will deal with the numerous, serious issues which its critics have raised. It seems certain that, whatever happens, General Secretary Donald Ramotar’s regiments will emerge bleeding and badly wounded from the battlefield.
Ralph Ramkarran, former PPP Central Committee member, has emerged as Donald Ramotar’s main critic over the past year. The question is, how many regiments does he have? His campaign has been confined largely to weekly comments in the media but they were enough to force the PPP hierarchy to respond. Ramkarran continues to accuse the present leadership (read Ramotar) of destroying the Party and tarnishing its image. Ramkarran warned: “The leadership of the PPP has lost its will, its creative and dynamic impulses and the capacity of constructive discourse. It is suffering from incumbency fatigue. It has grown tired”.
Ramotar, however, is far from tired.  He is an accomplished apparatchik.  He started his working life as an adolescent at the Party’s commercial arm – the Guiana Import-Export Company. He then moved to the Party’s labour arm – the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union and worked in communist Czechoslovakia for several years. He has been a member of the Party’s Central Committee and Executive Committee and then became the Party’s General Secretary.  He is, in short, a ‘Party’ man to the bone.
Ramotar, despite Ramkarran’s attacks, is still personally popular. He received 637 votes – the fourth highest score – for election to the Central Committee at the last Congress. He was unanimously re-elected to the general secretaryship and, if he chose, could certainly be elected Leader at the forthcoming Congress.
Another ‘Ralph’– Ralph Seeram – has been complaining about the Party’s problems.  He suggested that the PPP decided to return to Port Mourant for its congress because it was the birthplace and memorial site of its founder-leader, Cheddi Jagan.  Returning there is an attempt to recapture Cheddi’s charisma.
He wrote, “There was a time when you dare not say anything “bad” about the PPP to the people of Port Mourant. Now the people of Port Mourant are speaking “bad” of the PPP. That’s how far the PPP has declined. The evidence became very clear at the elections in 2011, where the AFC made inroads in the PPP stronghold…the PPP has been losing votes consistently at each election culminating with them losing the House at the 2011 election.”
The PPP’s problems go beyond the criticisms of Ramkarran and the complaints of Seeram. They are much more profound than is commonly supposed. The Party finds itself being rejected by some of its members because it has repudiated the very institutions and structures of society itself. The PPP’s socialism was never about creating autonomous collective structures to empower individuals, regardless of their circumstances and to enable them to prosper. Its socialism was always a means of social authoritarianism.
The PPP, essentially, is a statist party. It perceives society as a collective guided perpetually by a vanguard party – itself. The Party’s present policy dilemma is its historic adherence to the Soviet-style, Leninist, statist authoritarianism and its failure to practice internal democracy and adapt to external political change.
The most recent problems have arisen out of the Party’s pact with a new form of comprador capitalism. There has been a consequent and persistent failure to address the core issues and needs of civil society, of the labour movement and of the masses in general. This is evident in the restlessness of the usually party-friendly Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union and its systematic attempts at the degradation of the Guyana Public Service Union and the Guyana Trades Union Congress.
The post-2001 PPP has come to treat the state as the domain of certain individuals –but only certain individuals. This inexorably led to what Clive Thomas calls “the criminalisation of the state”.  This, in turn precipitated a grave, seven-year security crisis.
The post-2001 rampant individualism that is now prevalent has been built on the foundations of the post-1992 statism and is different in character. The PPP set out to reinforce state authoritarianism by the debilitation or deformation of important institutions.  It weakened the National Assembly.  It   undermined the independence or impartiality of the Public Service, the Security Services.  It emasculated the constitutional commissions set up to safeguard the integrity of those very institutions.
Important constitutional organs such as the Ombudsman and the Public Service Appellate Tribunal, which provided assurances to the public and protection from executive lawlessness, have virtually vanished. The Government Information Agency and the state media have excluded dissenting views and have increasingly become not organs in the public interest but agencies of the ruling political party – the PPP.
Cronyism and bad governance are at the root of the problems the Party’s confronts. The PPP has been unable to move beyond sectional interest and self-interest. Worse, it does not intend to do so. That is why its problems will persist long after its 30th Congress this week.

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