The unpredictable hand of history

Feb 04, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – I met a man a few days ago and we struck up a casual conversation. We joked and poked fun at each other.

As things ended up, I jokingly told him that perhaps one day I will have to address him as “His Excellency”, since he may end up being the President of Guyana. He laughed and said that it would take a miracle.

But life is not always predictable. Things have a way of turning out in unexpected outcomes.

Anyone can end up becoming President.  Even though Samuel Hinds was Prime Minister when the PPP/C began its first term in 1992, very few expected that Cheddi would get sick and die on the job and that Sam would be elevated to the Presidency.

Well, it happened and Sam Hinds, a member of the CIVIC component of the PPP/C who was hardly a political figure prior to 1990, became the President of Guyana. Not many could have predicted that development.

Not many, including she, could have envisioned that Janet Jagan would have become President. But regardless of what her colleagues say, she was determined, on her husband’s passing to assume the mantle of leadership – she saw it as her entitlement given her long years of political struggle and, who knows, the political opportunism of many of those who surrounded her husband.

The PPP/C went into the 1997 elections on an ‘A’ Team ticket – Janet Jagan as President, Samuel Hinds as Prime Minister and Bharrat Jagdeo to pull the youth vote. Even though it was said that there was always an agreement with the CIVIC that the PPP would always hold the Presidency and that therefore should anything happen to Janet that Bharrat would assume the Presidency, no one expected that Jagdeo would ever become President. He was too politically inexperienced and junior within the party.

But as things turned out he not only became President but powerful enough for the ‘matriarch’ of the party to be told that she was a private citizen. The unexpected hand, what Machiavelli refers to as FORTUNA, had its say.

 Similarly, Donald Ramotar, not being a member of PPP/C governments since 1992, was not necessarily the front-runner for the 2011 elections. Other names were given far more attention that Ramotar, and there was even the view that dynastic tendencies had overrun the PPP. But Donald prevailed over one of his more favoured rivals and emerged as the party’s Presidential candidate.

Ramotar was dealt a hard hand. He not only presided over the country’s first ever minority government but the PPP/C’s first ever electoral defeat in 23 years. He was never a left-wing firebrand but has far more working-class sympathies and ideological groundings than most in his party.

 Even though it is now being suggested that he was not keen to return to parliament in 2015 as Leader of the Opposition, there was no reason for someone of his political mettle to have been bypassed for the Presidential candidate for the 2020 elections. An injustice was done to him.

But even after it became clear that he would not be the Presidential candidate in 2020, not many persons would have thought that Irfaan Ali would have so easily sewn up the PPP/C support to be the Presidential candidate. The situation was so fluid that even a political novice who once embarrassed himself in the National Assembly threw his hat unofficially into the ring, deluding himself into believing that he stood a chance of gaining his party’s nod.  But Ali had the backing of the powerful economic class which supports the PPP and they were instrumental in sewing up his candidacy.

 And so as we look towards the 2025 and 2030 elections, we must not make the mistake of assuming that the predictable will happen. History has a way of turning out differently from the way we predict, and in politics, especially when it comes to the PPP/C, you never know what side the die of history will turn-up.

Machiavelli once said that luck plays a role in human destiny. In The Prince he wrote, “So that our free will may not be extinguished, I think it may be true that Fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half of them, more or less, to be governed by us.”

The PPP/C is now controlled by a powerful bourgeois class. But the strength of the economy by the end of the decade will see the middle class become more powerful and willing to assert its growing influence. By 2030, there is going to be a major conflict between the oligarchic class and an emerging powerful and large middle class.

Both classes will fight to ensure that whoever the PPP/C selects is favourable to them. And who knows what hand history will serve up then. A compromise candidate is quite possible.

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• CIVIC, Janet Jagan, Peeping Tom, PPP/C, President of Guyana

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