Only inclusive power, not oil alone, will birth a future

Mar 02, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

No occupation brings the human being face to face with the relentless progression of time than a daily commentator, whether print media or television.
Each time you go in front the camera or strike the keyboard, you record the new day, the new date and you realize that it was an entire year past by and it looked just like yesterday.
Thirty one years ago, I started writing columns, and time just went by. Where did those years go? I am 41 years in marriage; my kid is grown up and just back from the UK with her Masters; I have suddenly found myself in my late sixties, and the Guyana I knew in those thirty years is not the Guyana I know today.
I typed in the date of this column and it is like if a bolt of lightning woke me up to the fact that I was talking to my kid in London just yesterday but in fact she is back.
As I struck the keyboard it has dawned on me that 2015 is long gone. The formation that toppled the PPP in 2015 has completed five years in power. I just can’t believe five years went by so quickly
As I type this piece, circling inside my mind is the forceful consciousness, the flashing awareness that Guyana is getting older as a country but nothing is changing. In other words, time is leaving Guyana behind.
All, with few exceptions, major media houses in the world have written on a nascent rich country emerging from prodigious oil discovery. That country is my land of birth, Guyana. But will oil bring a future?
Rewind the tape nine years ago to 2011 and bring it up to 2015. The roads not taken in 2011 and 2015 this entire nation must now walk on after March 3 and stay there stuck in cement on that pathway. It is the direction of inclusive governance we missed from 2011 onwards right up to this date.
In 2011, a government was formed by a party that did not win a majority of votes cast in the general election. It was the time for that administration to acknowledge that it didn’t have both, a moral and philosophical mandate, to make rules, laws, edicts and policies for the entire nation.
The decent thing to do was to try the approach however, elusive, never attempted before – inclusive politics. The 2011 regime didn’t walk that road. That leadership did not put itself inside the mind of the other half and try to understand how the other half saw it.
The other half didn’t want the 2011 dispensation to rule without bringing it on board.
In the 2015, the election results gave the winner 50.3 percent while the loser collected 49. 7percent. To call that that victory a narrow margin, may be far from an accurate description. That was an infinitesimally close finish.
The term that I use in these columns is one I picked up from cricket commentaries; “a coat of varnish.”
The 2015 dispensation did not attempt to understand how the other half felt. The other half was not brought into the scheme of things. The other half resented the “coat of varnish” approach to power after 2015.
So here we are today. You have to be a bloody, raging idiot to think that on March 3 or maybe March 4 or knowing what Guyana is, maybe March 7 the president won’t be either from the PPP or the leader of the PNC.
But here I am guessing that if either one wins it will take one of two shapes – a 51 versus 49 percent or a minority government.
Once that kind of power is acquired, then inclusive governance that we missed out on from 2011 has to come into play. I am contending that even if there is a 52 percent versus 48 percent result that is not a decisive margin of victory in a plural society like Guyana is. Even with 52 versus 48, inclusive governance has to be pursued.
Almost the entire nation sees the oil revenues as the beginning foundation of a sound, workable future. Count me out of that scenario. There were three high points of economic blossoming – Burnham- 1970 to 1978; Hoyte – 1987 to 1992; and Jagdeo – 2006 to 2011. In all three configurations the divided society saw one half that was left out of power-sharing disparaging the government of the day.
Oil money is coming but will oil money erase the culture of ethnic suspicion, ethnic anger, winner-take-all politics, incestuous politics, preferential spending? My answer is no. Guyana’s future lies in power-sharing.

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