Can Sri Lanka and Greece be repeated in Guyana?

Jan 31, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The diplomats from the ABC countries in Guyana (for God’s sake, not as Argentina, Chile and Brazil that Neil Kumar named them but America, Britain and Canada) have urged Guyanese to vote on issues.
Why should anyone tell the population of a country to do the commonsensical thing? Well that may be so, but this is Guyana and those diplomats and the hundreds of their predecessors who once lived here know that this is a psychically damaged nation. Guyana is just not your normal run-of-the-mill state. Guyana is not a mainstream polity.
When you look at the electoral history of Guyana it is frightening. In over sixty-one years since elections were held in 1953, state power among political parties only changed hands twice. In 1964, the PPP lost. In 1992, the PNC lost. Power changed hands twice in sixty-one years and there is a reason for that – people do not vote on issues and that eccentricity has pushed this nation into maddening tragedy.
While the analyst will tell you that it is unacceptable but psychologically understandable for people to just blindly vote for race and not issues, what needs to be said is the consequences will inevitably be devastating. Among the consequences is the stagnation of ideas, the illusion of invincibility, the absence of punishment for wrong-doing and the encouragement to treat people badly who disagree because such people are a threat to the invincibility.
Two fantastic cases of power cleansing based on issue-voting rather than ethnic loyalty are Sri Lanka and Greece. One of President Rajapaksa’s Ministers left his Cabinet last year and challenged him at the poll two weeks ago. Rajapaksa literally ignored his rival, Mr. Sirisena. For Rajapaksa, he was just a nuisance factor.
When Rajapaksa heard how the counting was going, it is alleged that he called in the army to stop his electoral loss. The dimension of his loss that Rajapaksa finds unbelievable is that large sections of the rural community where he was virtually a king voted against him. In other words, rural Sri Lankans looked at general issues. It was not town versus country factor when they went to cast their ballot.
Rajapaksa is in serious trouble because the new President, Sirisena is likely to charge him with abuse of power. The evidence against him is mounting. In Greece the situation was far worse. Accepting an austerity package last year from the EU, Greece was reduced to a second rate Third World country. The austerity measures were too incredible to believe or imagine – pensions were reduced.
Imagine you work all your life and when it was time for you to relax and enjoy your life, your pension is cut in half.
A new party, Syriza challenged the traditional parties last Sunday and won the elections. If asinine was an appropriate word to use in political analysis, then it applies most aptly to the ruling politicians that lost the Greek election. Why would voters choose to keep in power a group that takes away the pension of old people who worked all their lives only to find they may go to their graves in poverty? The Greek electorate voted on issues.
In both Sri Lanka and Greece, the voters wanted change and if they were to get change then they had to throw out people whose policies they rejected but most of all, people who they felt were no longer interested in the population at large. Voters bring in new minds and reject the out-of-touch politicians because it’s the commonsensical to do so.
It is not commonsensical to retain a ruling party because the leaders’ religion is the same as yours, so you vote for religious reason and not for the urgent issues facing your country.
In one of the most historic examples where people turned their backs on ethnic loyalty and chose issues in a general election, was the defeat of John McCain by Barack Obama. White Americans chose a black man as President because they felt the discontinuation of war would not have been on the front burner of Mr. Mc Cain and the American people wanted an end to American wars in the Middle East.
The tragedy of Guyana is more than sixty years old and every student with some training in political sociology will know that the source of that tragedy is the lack of commonsense in the way Guyanese vote. Choosing to cast a ballot for politicians because they belong to the same race as you cannot create a generous, humane mind out of those politicians. What it creates are politicians who believe they will forever be elected to rule.

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Can Sri Lanka and Greece be repeated in Guyana?

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