The People’s Progressive Party is exhausted

Mar 22, 2015 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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(This article was first published in 2013 and is reprinted with slight changes)
The People’s Progressive Party, after nearly 23 years in office, is exhausted. Taken together with its seven-year tenure from 1957 to 1964, the Party has wielded executive power over the people of this country for 30 years. Its energy has been expended. Its ideas have expired.
The PPP, in the euphoria of the elections of 5th of October 1992, used to publish reams of articles and booklets praising its supposed performance. It still likes to tell its supporters that its victory in the 1992 elections ushered in a period of uninterrupted progress. It cites the five consecutive PPP administrations – of Cheddi Jagan; Samuel Hinds; Janet Jagan; Bharrat Jagdeo and, now, Donald Ramotar – as milestones of advancement. The milestones have become millstones. They have become increasingly burdensome to bear. The PPP’s one-party domination of the country has damaged both democracy and development.
It was Bharrat Jagdeo’s 19th March 2001 victory, perhaps, which exposed the PPP’s ‘project’ for Guyana. A plethora of problems arose out of Jagdeo’s tenure which ended in 2011. The Party, during that period, persistently failed to address the basic needs of civil society, the labour movement and the masses in general. This is evident in the perpetual restlessness of the workers’ unions, the poverty of the working people and, particularly, the degradation of the Guyana Trades Union Congress.
The PPP, in the post-2001 period, made government the domain of an oligarchy – persons who felt free to pursue subjective interests of their own to the prejudice of the public good and in defiance of the public will. This inexorably led to the criminalisation of the state and, in turn, precipitated the gravest and longest public security crisis this country ever witnessed. The PPP’s problems sprang largely from the bizarre policies it adopted to deal with the security crisis. Those policies exposed the political contradictions within the party itself and widened the gap between the Party and the people.
The PPP then set out to reinforce state authoritarianism by the debilitation and deformation of important institutions. It tried to subordinate the National Assembly to the Executive branch of government. It undermined the independence or impartiality of the Public Service, the Security Services, and the constitutional commissions which had been established to safeguard the integrity of those very institutions. It obstructed the installation of important constitutional organs – such as the Public Service Appellate Tribunal – which were created to provide protection to the public from executive lawlessness.
It impaired regulatory and law-enforcement agencies – such as the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit; the Environmental Protection Agency and the Guyana Energy Agency – by depriving them of adequate assets, equipment and financing to such an extent as to diminish their capability to function effectively. It cultivated the state-owned communications media – the Government Information Agency, Guyana National Newspapers Limited (publishers of the Guyana Chronicle) and the National Communications Network – as Party organs to systematically excluded dissenting opinions.
The PPP’s main failure has been the loss of trust and confidence, even among its staunch supporters. The Party spectacularly failed to advance local democracy by destroying neighbourhood democratic councils and delaying local government elections. It failed to maintain educational standards which are now characterised by poor performance from the primary schools to the 50-year-old University of Guyana.
The PPP has failed most seriously to address the country’s most pressing problem – the public security crisis. The Party simply does not accept its responsibility for the high rate of armed robberies, the murderous maritime piracy, the rampant gun-running and contraband smuggling and other violent crimes that rage along the coastland. The PPP, strangely, does not seem to understand why it is failing, and so has no idea about what to do to avoid the logical outcome of the loss of political confidence by the public.
The Party finds itself being rejected by society because it has repudiated the very institutions, structures and culture of society itself. It imposed a form of social authoritarianism in which it perceived society as a collective which it could manipulate. Its dominant legacy has not been the creation of a balanced society in which individuality and communality merge into a group identity that reflects and represents both individual needs and national unity.  Its political philosophy, instead, has been founded on an urge to transform society into something it can control.
That is the reason why its leaders and policy-makers so easily and frequently abuse the political opposition and criticise civil society – especially the Amerindian People’s Association, Guyana Bar Association, Guyana Human Rights Association and the Guyana Trades Union Congress. It has failed to accept its obligations to recognise the claims and needs of the diverse elements of the Guyanese nation. It has failed to move beyond sectional interest and self-interest towards a shared identity.
The PPP has failed to transform Guyana into a united, modern, democratic state. That Party seems to be incapable of embracing the common good but, instead, adheres to the authoritarian style of government that has so badly weakened our national institutions.

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