The PNC at 60: Four leaders, four periods

Oct 03, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In exactly one week from today, the PNC will have celebratory events of 60 years of existence. One solitary column on October 10, on the subject will not capture sixty years of such a huge institution and the prodigious influence it had and has on this country.
For now, some preliminary notes are in order. The first thing that strikes you about the six decades of existence of the PNC is a sad but also a disturbing one.
How can any country move forward if it does not fertilise new faces with new ideas. The PPP is just over sixty years old and in all that mammoth time, only produced three leaders. Surely, a country cannot have a meaningful future with such intellectual stagnation. First it was Cheddi Jagan. After he died, his wife was the Leviathan until 2001 when Bharrat Jagdeo won the national elections and asserted his leadership over government and party. Mr. Jagdeo is still the head of the PPP.
There is a gap – November 2011 to May 2015. Donald Ramotar was the president and virtual controller of government and party in those years. But was he? The analyst and historian are not certain. In that period, Mr. Jagdeo extended strong influence over the presidency and the PPP that made him the real power in government and party.
If one accepts the Jagdeo continuation, then for sixty five years, the PPP has had only three leaders. If you include Ramotar, that makes it four. Still that is an indictment of a country that could be accused of going backwards.
If the historian puts Ramotar as one of the leaders then the PPP has four but so does the PNC. The PNC’s monarch has been Forbes Burnham.
From the birth of party until the death of the leader in 1985, Burnham was the PNC, the PNC was Burnham. The other three are Desmond Hoyte, Robert Corbin and David Granger. So over its sixty-year span, the PNC has only seen four leaders. It tells a lot about the stagnant state of politics in Guyana.
It may be intellectually misleading to separate these four periods and analyse their contents without assigning a major part of the analysis to the leader himself in each phase.
You cannot assess the first phase of the PNC without Burnham’s dominant portrait. What the PNC became after Burnham’s death was the result of the desire of one man, Desmond Hoyte.
Of the four PNC leaders, Robert Corbin never led a government but history will not be kind to Corbin because his tenure was marked by sheer confusion, massive divisions and questionable strategies. We begin the journey with the first road – the highway of Forbes Burnham. A separate column will be devoted to Hoyte and we will conclude with Corbin and Granger.
Forbes Burnham will remain in the textbook of Guyanese politics and in any textbook on politics where he is featured as an enigma. Mr. Burnham embodied a dialectical contradiction that is both fascinating and disturbing.
Only one world fits the description of Burnham’s transformational ability – enormous. Burnham innovative, visionary, transformative capacity was simply enormous.
He was no banal leader who decided things will fall in place. He put them in their correct places. He was way ahead of his time.
An indomitable nationalist, he knew what were the fulcrums on which economic independence should stand. He came up with a framework for the economic transformation of post-colonial Guyana and it was phenomenal.
If I were to single out one of his master strokes as numero uno, I would choose the multilateral school project. That was a serious attempt to bring about class equality in Guyana. It was a stroke of genius.
No PNC leader since Burnham has come even within a billion miles of matching his transformative vision.
Only one word best described Forbes Burnham’s ontology – authoritarian. This was his untergang. Burnham was a deeply authoritarian man who believed that a leader should have maximum power to engineer a country to social freedoms.
He did not accept that society has a right to confront that leader if that leader was straying from the pathways to freedom.
Even Hobbes in his great book on political power wrote that once the Leviathan didn’t live up to his side of the social contract, he should be removed.
Maybe Walter Rodney read Hobbes. That explains the zero sum battle between them. It is intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind to praise Burnham’s visionary leadership and leave out the extensive acts of authoritarian decay. When he died, the PNC became a formation that was unlike the PNC, Guyana had ever known under Burnham.

2 thoughts on “The PNC at 60: Four leaders, four periods”

Juan Allicock October 3, 2017 at 7:02 am

Very complementary of Burnham’s dictatorship. The Guyana Bill of Rights the right rule for life .
1. rs dasai October 3, 2017 at 8:15 pm
  
  Juan
  The Freddi is right , after Forbes, there was food.(?)