PNC at 60: Ironic metamorphosis

Oct 07, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Last Tuesday, I began a three part series on the PNC at age 60. That essay briefly looked at Forbes Burnham. Today, I assess Desmond Hoyte. This man’s tale is one of Guyana’s prodigious ironies. Of all the persons who became leader of the PNC, is the person whose career was hardly grounded in the ontology of the PNC. Hoyte first rose into the public’s eyes when he was appointed as member of the Elections Commission in 1968.
From thereon, he climbed and climbed until he became Prime Minister but it was all due to Forbes Burnham’s personal endorsement and facilitation. It was not due to the enormity of party work for, according to Elvin McDavid, Hoyte was never a party man. There is hardly anyone alive today, whether in or out of the PNC who would contradict that statement.
Guyana has produced two unique political characters in Desmond Hoyte and Rupert Roopnarine. Both were strongly middle class personalities with elitist touches about them who found groundings with the masses of their parties, a difficult occupation. But they each rose to leadership within their respective parties whose unashamed manifesto was working class social elevation. Only an illogical country like Guyana can produce such unbelievable inscrutability
McDavid maintained that throughout his Cabinet years, Hoyte showed no indications of embracing socialist economics and socialist ideology. Yet in 1984, President Burnham made him Prime Minister in front of candidates who had more appreciation for socialist economics. There is no written material to date analysing that decision of the openly avowed socialist President, Forbes Burnham.
Only one book has been published on the Burnham years in government up to the time of Burnham’s death (Tyrone Ferguson, “To survive sensible or court heroic death: Management of Guyana’s Political Economy, 1965-1985) and it does not explain why such a socialist leader would choose an anti-socialist politician to succeed him; indeed less than a year after his appointment as PM, Hoyte succeeded Burnham.
My guess is that the appointment of Hoyte as PM in 1984 had nothing to do with Burnham’s special likeness for Hoyte. That is not in dispute, but that was not the reason. In 1984, Burnham made the self-irritating decision that the global powers will not help his government unless there is a relinquishment of socialist economics. He knew if any PNC leader would be welcomed and trusted to lead the negotiations with the West, it would be Hoyte. And Burnham was right! The West did agree to help Guyana with Hoyte at the helm.
What Hoyte did to the PNC after 1987 was something that made Burnham turned in his grave a million times! One of Guyana’s greatest ironies was on display. Hoyte de-Burnhamised the PNC and the PNC Government. But he also exorcised socialist policies, socialist politics and socialist people from the PNC. The socialists were all gone; not even given token slots somewhere in the party or even in the state. Hoyte wanted then far gone.
This is where in the analysis of the PNC you have to stress the role of the leader, rather than the party. The leader has always been the party. Burnham shaped the PNC. Hoyte shaped the PNC. Corbin shaped the PNC. Granger is doing the same thing. In Guyana, party politics is about the whims, fancy, desires, dreams, and ideas of the leader. By 1988, the face of the PNC and the Government of Guyana bore no resemblance to the visage of the PNC under Burnham, Hamilton Green, and Ptolemy Reid collectively.
From 1988, Hoyte went into directions that will continue to torment researchers. Who was President Hoyte? What did he believe in? What were his cultural and sociological views of Guyana? As an academic, I would say Hoyte embodies sufficient complexities to give you a headache as a researcher. The positives and negatives were enormous. We cannot enumerate them in a newspaper column.
On the positive side, I think when he became president in 1985, he underwent a philosophical metamorphosis. He wanted to ride away from the authoritarian realism of Burnham. Because of the retention of some ‘colonial’ instincts (I said that on a Channel 9 Panel with Aubrey Norton, to which Norton did not disagree), Hoyte was prepared to engineer a society where the basic fulcrums on which stand the rule of law, democratic governance, state service to the people and discipline in the use of power were strengthened and made into steel. On the negative side, he was not schooled in political theory to understand that you cannot separate economics from politics. He did that and in the process, impoverished the working classes of the entire country.

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