The PNC/R is facing its Waterloo

Aug 20, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – In Guyana, both of the main political parties want to win elections. Each of these two main political parties draws the bulk of its support from one ethnic group. As such, a political contest invariably descends into an ethnic competition.

As such, a win for one side is seen as a loss for the other; in other words, win for one side is seen as a win for one ethnic group and a loss for the other.

There used to be a time when the supporters of the PNC felt it could never win an election because of the then ethnic arithmetic. But it was able in 1968 to join with The United Force (TUF) and to secure political office.

The marriage did not last long. Declassified documents point to the emergence of serious differences between the two headstrong leaders of the PNC and The United Force. The United States embassy in Guyana intervened directly to avoid a split in the 1964 Coalition government.

Burnham eventually had enough of Coalition politics. He decided to go it alone in the 1968 elections and went ahead and rigged all the elections from then until his death in 1985. The government under Desmond Hoyte continued this shameless practice.

Many of the PNC supporters turned a blind eye to the rigging because it saw the victory of the party as an ethnic victory.  And it felt that rigging was the only way to get power since the ethnic arithmetic was against it.

The PPP/C came to power in 1992 but over time, the ethnic arithmetic changed. By the time, the 2011 elections came around, the ethnic arithmetic had changed enough to allow for the possibility of a change in government. The PPP/C narrowly held on in 2011 to the Presidency but lost its once assured majority in the National Assembly.

In 2015, the tables were turned. The APNU – which was a thin partnership of the PNC/R and other parties – joined forces with the Alliance For Change and they secured the reins of government by the narrowest of margins. Those elections pointed to the changing demographics of the country. Parties could no longer count on the support of any one ethnic group for victory.

However, APNU made the same mistake which was made by Burnham. It had a rocky relationship with the AFC. It even went to the 2018 local government elections without the AFC as a coalition partner. It was hammered by the PPP/C which swept more than 60 percent of the votes cast.

But still the APNU did not learn its lesson. It created more problems with the AFC in the run-up to the crucial 2020 polls. It lost those elections to the PPP/C but tried to benefit from attempts at rigging the results.

This was a major misstep of the APNU because the world had changed. The western countries which had turned a blind eye to Burnham’s and Hoyte’s rigging could not do so any longer. The new world post-Cold War world order which was being constructed was being built on respect for free and fair elections and the western nations could not and did not  turn a blind eye to the attempt to foist a rigged election on the nation.

For the first time ever, travel sanctions were imposed on individuals for their alleged involvement in the attempt to rig the elections. The APNU+AFC did not need to do what it did. Had it gone into the elections as a more united front and had its economic policies not imposed hardships on the people, it could have won re-election.

The ethnic arithmetic of the country is not the same as it was in the past when the PPP was assured of a victory once there was ethnic voting. The situation at present is that no ethnic group by itself can deliver a victory to either of the two main political parties.

But the PNC/R shot itself in the foot and is now imploding. It has destroyed its credibility by the attempts to benefit from rigged elections. It has virtually assured itself of a long stay on the opposition benches because it will take a long time for it to regain the ground and the support which it lost.

The PNC/R would need to reinvent itself if it is to have any chance of ever regaining political power. But instead of reinventing itself as a democratic force, the PNC/R seems keen to continue to perpetuate the same old discredited narrative which it used to justify its loss.

Local government elections are going to be held later this year whether the PNC/R likes it or not. The PNC/R continues to make demands for a new voters’ list. It has made these demands because it is part of the discredited narrative as to why the Coalition lost the elections.

The PNC/R is boxing itself into a corner from which it will not be able to contest the elections. The Georgetown municipality has long been a bastion of the now Opposition PNC/R.

The PPP/C will never win Georgetown. But what will happen is that smaller parties and groups are going to take advantage of the PNC/R’s likely absence from this year’s local government elections to seize control of the municipality, and that will be the end of PNC/R’s domination of city politics.

(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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