Guyanese political behaviour is more complex than we make it out to be

Nov 24, 2019 Features / Columnists, Hinds' Sight with Dr. David Hinds

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about our politics and society. Well, at least more than I usually do. I think a lot about younger Guyanese and their political socialisation. I have never been more worried about hyper-partisanship than I am now.

Dr. David Hinds

There is something extra venomous about the discourse these days. It’s one of the reasons I stay away from Facebook “discussions” and stopped reading the comments that accompany the news-stories of the online editions of the newspapers. The mixture of uninformed commentary and personal attacks is too much for me.
I am also worried about what passes for political analysis. Social media have revolutionised people’s access to news and information, but that comes with a cheapening of political conversation. People read headlines and mouth off as if they read the story or respond by abusing the author.
Often the discussion is not about the article, but about some foolish comment made by somebody who never read it in the first place. And then the nasty racial comments and abuse is something else. I have my doubts about social media as an effective form of political communication.
This brings me to the subject of today’s column. I have argued in this column for a new thinking about Guyanese politics. One of the things I learned from my recent visits to several communities is how much we politicians, commentators and scholars are out of touch with people’s thinking about politics, economics and society.
Part of it has to do with the fact that we uncritically use old paradigms to try to make sense of new political motion. We treat the society as static and unchanging, and in the process, miss subtle and not so subtle adjustments on the part of the people whose political behaviour we seek to analyse.
A lot of it can to some extent be excused. We do not have regular independent opinion polling in Guyana. The only “reliable” polls we have are the election results. And those results tell us one thing over and over—the vast majority of African Guyanese and Indian Guyanese electorally support the PNC and PPP respectively. And we infer that that support is ethnically driven. That is all we can know from electoral results, but every analysis begins and ends with that knowledge.
I have come to learn from closer observation and from communicating with sections of the society that there is much more to Guyanese political behaviour than what election results tell us. In other words, race is not the only factor that influences political behaviour. Further, electoral behaviour is not the sum total of Guyanese political behaviour. The vote for the most part is determined not by political beliefs and policy preferences, but by ethno-political imperatives which often run counter to people’s broader political beliefs and aspirations.
This is where the Walter Rodney-WPA phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s surprised many and gives us a nuanced understanding of Guyanese political behaviour.
How could Rodney and WPA penetrate, in such profound ways, communities that were known to have voted overwhelmingly for the PNC? How could people who voted for a party join a movement that wanted to topple the very government they voted for? How could Rodney, a known Black Nationalist, resonate with sections of the Indian Guyanese community that were known to be loyal to the PPP?
The WPA attracted and consolidated a multi-ethnic and in some regards a multi-class movement that almost toppled the PNC regime. Yet when free and fair elections returned in 1992, people voted for the same party that they previously wanted to eliminate from power.
Here is where I think younger Guyanese are being shortchanged. You often hear that the WPA died when Walter Rodney died in 1980. That uninformed statement eliminates from scrutiny a whole decade of revolutionary politics led by the WPA that eventually saw the demise of the authoritarian regime of the day and, in the process, the rise to the fore of democratic instincts within the PNC.
It was that revolutionary pro-democracy movement that facilitated the return to power of the PPP and rise to the fore of the authoritarian instincts within that party. The irony which many commentators avoid like the plague is that the PPP and the PNC moved in opposite directions once free and fair elections returned in the 1990s.
The rise of the AFC in 2006 offers another opportunity for us to move beyond the African-Indian/PNC-PPP paradigm. Here is a party with no strong ideological grounding that was able to expose the political deficiencies of both major parties at the ballot box. That was a significant achievement that facilitated the rise to power of the Coalition. The irony is that in 2020, the AFC from all projections would do poorly electorally if they contest on their own. But that is only part of the story.
Those who have been trying to make sense of the recent APNU+AFC negotiations have tied themselves up in knots, because they use the simplistic paradigm of potential and real electoral strength as the premise for the outcome. These people are obviously surprised at how much the AFC got in the end, even if it is less than they got in 2015. Many will think APNU is stupid to give up so much again. The bottom line is the APNU parties know the symbolic and substantive worth of the AFC.
I am contending that the AFC’s worth cannot be confined to the number of votes it can potentially get. Those who base their analysis on that factor are missing a lot about the country’s political dynamics. The presence of the AFC and WPA in the coalition with the PNC offers the Guyanese people an alternative to the PNC, which in turn becomes a winning alternative to the PPP.
If the AFC retreats from the Coalition, the electoral strength of the latter diminishes considerably. And if the WPA withdraws from APNU, there will be no longer an APNU. The Impact of the Coalition in mobilising the traditional “PNC voter” was pivotal in the 2015 slender victory and is the key to a Coalition victory in 2020.
My strong sense is that without the Coalition, a section of that vote would stay home or migrate to one of the newer parties. The AFC and WPA are the Third Parties within the Coalition. Those who say the Coalition is the PNC and the PNC is the Coalition are being simplistic and are out of touch with the changing reality.
The PNC behaves that way, but such behaviour masks a more complex reality. To grasp that complexity, one must first conceptualise Guyanese political behaviour in complex terms. It’s not as simplistic as we make it out to be.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

More of Dr. Hinds’ writings and commentaries can be found on his YouTube Channel Hinds’ Sight: Dr. David Hinds’ Guyana-Caribbean Politics and on his website www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.news. Send comments to [email protected]