From Burnham to Granger: Aspects of African Guyanese political sociology

Oct 11, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – If a researcher comes from another planet and follows the writings of people like David Hinds; UG’s Deputy Vice Chancellor, Dr. Melissa Ifill; Dr. Alissa Trotz, Barrington Braithwaite, the Red Thread Organization, ACDA, Vincent Alexander, Eusi Kwayana, just to name a few, on the five months election crisis, that visitor would conclude the above names were/are concerned with African Guyanese coming under perpetual Indian domination.
There have crucial changes in Guyana’s political sociology. The PPP and PNC do not have sufficient ethnic numbers to win an exclusive racial victory. The fact is that with changing demographics, election victory can alternate between the PNC and PPP which is what has been happening since 2011.
The PNC gets its vote from Africans whose presence is 29 percent. Indians are 39 percent. It means Guyana has other race groups that constitute 32 percent of the population. It is that 32 percent that caused the PPP to lose in 2011 and 2015 and to win in 2020. Importantly, there is small cross-racial voting among Indians and Africans and ethnic abstention that can determine victory.
Ravi Dev has spent years arguing that the PPP cannot perpetually win elections because they don’t have the ethnic numbers therefore the fear of Africans that they will forever be in the opposition cannot stand. Dev argues that the African security dilemma has evaporated because the PPP lost two elections. I cannot see how any theorist writing on Guyana’s political sociology can ignore the theoretical value of the defeat of the PPP in two elections.
Those losses are graphic indicators that ethnic election victories are a thing of the past. Why then did the PNC not concede in 2020 and regroup to win in 2025? Using all the charts, diagrams, statistics and data available, such a possibility existed before the PNC went into self-destructive directions between March and August 2020.
There were two attitudes by African Guyanese in and out of Guyana to the rigging of the 2020 elections by a combination of GECOM and APNU+AFC. The first group wanted the PNC to remain in power because it is an emotional thing for them. They see the election defeat as Jagdeo coming back and he will run the presidency from behind the scenes mistreating Africans and doing unorthodox things that are anathema to democracy.
This group did not put an intellectual spin on the rigging. Their position was banal and ordinary – we prefer the PNC to Jagdeo; we accept the rigging. The second school was/is far more dangerous. Within this grouping are the PNC itself; African organizations, the remnants of the WPA; middle class Creole intellectuals in the diaspora; certain well known African rights individuals like Lincoln Lewis.
This conglomeration has a historical and intellectual polemic that they offer for justification for election rigging. One half of the reasoning goes like this. Africans came here as slaves and in working as slaves they contributed in far superior ways to any other cultural and racial community that came after. This historical theory posits that there is an African entitlement which Guyana should recognize.
The other half of the submission is that since the possession of resources by non-Africans are billions of miles ahead of Africans, Guyana should be fair and just and allow Africans to have state power to even out the resource disparity. This second part of the discourse was literally shaped by Forbes Burnham. He saw election as a hindrance to African state power and treated it flippantly. He also was contemptuous of the rule of law which he saw as another hindrance to African state power.
Two persons who literally worship Burnham are David Granger and Vincent Alexander, the latter being the president of the Forbes Burnham Institute with the former being its patron. Both of these men came to power in 2015. Both of them decided to re-enact the two horizons Burnham invented with damning autocratic impulses and cunning Machiavellian instincts.
The two pathways were rigged election and permanent state power. From the moment victory came in 2015, the re-enactment began. Three manifestations were clear to see. One – control all levers of the state, through the ministry of the presidency with the concomitant curtailment of prime ministerial powers. Two – maximize the presence of African Guyanese in the totality of the state. Three – rig the election through the chairmanship of Justice Patterson and the three PNC commissioners.
In the end, the Burnhamite framework of Granger and Alexander were extirpated through an institution Burnham hated – the rule of law. The PNC and its surrogates lost permanent power because of the rule of law. Guyana’s highest court first removed Patterson then outlawed the subterfuge of Mingo, Myers and Lowenfield. The rest is history.

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

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