Gone too far

Nov 07, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

A democracy will slip perceptibly into and dwell comfortably in an authoritarian edifice if there are no early endeavours by civil society and the opposition organizations to stem the ruling elite’s descent into unpopular policies.
Both APNU and the AFC can perambulate up and down the square miles of Guyana preaching about PPP dictatorship and denouncing naked power, but the Guyanese people know that they have given the PPP Government a type of latitude that modern politics does not allow for in any part of the world.
What emerges out of this scenario is an immensely self-confident government. There is nothing complex in trying to fathom this kind of political evolution. When the PPP moved from one evil to another and the road was made clearer for more egregious travel, the PPP took on an aura of invincibility.
It began with Mr. Robert Corbin when he was leader of the opposition. Two sacred pillars of PNC politics Mr. Corbin allowed the PPP to dismantle. Had either Corbin or the PNC as a collective confronted the Government, history the past twelve years would have been complete. The first was the virtual theft of the Guyana Labour Union from the PNC.
It is not that there was an implosion in the GLU that the PNC could not have stopped. It is not that the GLU rose up against the PNC and said it wanted another union. Mr. Carvil Duncan switched sides and began to move the GLU into the arms of the PPP. The PNC did not lift a finger. The rest is an indictment on Mr. Corbin’s credibility as a politician.
The second decapitation was the real politic fight that the PPP carried to the Public Service Union. If the PNC had any mass support it lay within the large arena of the public service. The PPP degutted the union. By the time Corbin was exposed as an unhistorical figure, by the time Team Alexander failed to oust him, the PPP’s authoritarian train was out of control.
What the PPP did under Jagdeo was to first undermine the PNC as an organization then set about to establish totalitarian control of Guyana. So easy and smooth were the travels on the road to dictatorship that the PPP took macabre, bizarre and horribly sickening excesses in consolidating power. The PPP just felt it had no opposition.
One nasty example was the largest indication that the PPP was basking in chauvinistic glory. In no other Caribbean country, you can ask public servants to take a polygraph and if they fail it automatic dismissal results.
After the 2011 elections, the national discourse centered on how the PPP can behave as if it won the election. Even the US Ambassador said last week that a minority government has to negotiate. Research would show that in any county with an executive presidency, the constitution invests the legislature with legal power and in practical terms that power will be exercised if there is a split between the Executive and the legislature.
It has not happened in Guyana because the PPP went so far with its totalitarian omnipotence under Mr. Jagdeo that Jagdeo’s successor has inherited the aura of invincibility.
And it will not stop even if a no-confidence is secured in the Parliament by the combined action of the AFC and APNU.
This columnist has opined more than three times on this page that the PPP will not accept a no-confidence motion. They will put up the anticipated argument to be followed by the usual legal resort. First, it will argue that the motion was in violation of House rules therefore was invalid.
Secondly, it will ask the court to make an interpretation.
We will only have general elections in Guyana if and when the PPP decides. Until the PPP makes up its mind, the autocratic trends will continue. It is doubtful that the PPP will negotiate on any policy that the opposition finds antithetical to freedom, rights, justice and democracy. The PPP will not and cannot.
It has gone so far down the trail of dictatorship and its psychology of invincibility prevents it from being rational and logical.
If the PPP is to retreat on its tyranny of the minority, if the PPP is to come to its senses, it will only happen when the two opposition parties decide that they had enough of the exhaustive politics of parliamentary debates. It will only happen when the supporters of APNU and AFC tell them that they are behaving like beggars in front of a driver who has parked his car right on top of their bridge thereby imprisoning them in their own yard.

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Gone too far

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