Trapped in a cycle of ethno-political strife, corruption, and mismanagement by the PPP and PNC

Jul 23, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

Alternatives for political representation in Guyana have been rendered almost non-existent by the collective failure of the PPP and PNC to facilitate the necessary constitutional reforms and to disassociate themselves from ethnopolitical politicking.

This has stifled the evolution of democracy, exemplified by the absence and limited success of social justice and political grassroots movements. The proverbial more fuel on the fire is ethnopolitical strife both parties conveniently and calculatingly propagate and persistent financial, economic, and law enforcement corruption.

The reality in Guyana is that many of our people have either migrated for a better life or are struggling to make ends meet. However, the PPP and PNC don’t want to focus on this. Making up this group are African and Indian Guyanese who somehow believe that a vote for either party will make things better. We have been hoping for this for over 50 years despite the PPP and PNC showing us their true colours time and time again.

The PPP and PNC can always count on people with the mindset of I vote for the PPP because I am Indian and I vote for the PNC because I am African to vote for them regardless of their daily struggle and mismanagement of our nation’s resources and government. So, we have had governments doing just enough for each group, and the country as a whole, but not too much lest their grip on power over these two groups. Losing their group power means they actually have to perform well and be accountable because there are more and better alternatives.

There needs to be space for democracy to evolve to better serve a small multicultural society like ours. Part of the problem is that Guyanese have limited alternatives to political representation. The required constitutional changes require political will, that’s it! It could happen by the next sitting of Parliament. However, necessary reforms such as removing the provision of Executive Presidency, which essentially renders any President of Guyana a dictator, and constitutionally ensuring that Parliamentarians are directly elected by the Guyanese people means that it would not be business as usual for the PPP and PNC any longer.

It is a telltale sign that democracy has been stifled when the nation cannot point to a post-Independence single grassroots political movement that helped press reform or was unanimously elected to usher in a new era of national governance and human development. Worse yet, since 1992 there has been zero such grassroots movements in the organic sense of the concept. That is, a movement with an agenda made up of ordinary people. There may have been attempts to mobilize energy and membership, but this does not constitute a grassroots movement in and of itself. And although the AFC was birthed primarily out of discontent with the then government’s performance, the economy, quality of life concerns, and crime, philosophically, the party was conceived of as an opportunity of convenience and strategy, not a sustained grassroots movement. And the so-called small parties that joined with the PPP for the March 2020 elections are not grassroots movements, in so much as there are strategic alliances supported by friends for convenience. That is, if the PPP hadn’t lost the 2015 elections and decided that it was strategically useful to align with parties some of its own top supporters helped to create, it would not have done so.

The takeaway here is not that a political party borne of a grassroots movement is the better alternative to one formed from another means or that there’s a preference. Grassroots movements not only evolve into political parties, but they can also grow into regulatory bodies, and workers’ rights groups, trigger or being a precursor of reform. The takeaway is that grassroots movements are missing which could signal that people are terrified of the sociopolitical backlash, complacent, content, uninterested, or too divided.

Yours truly,

B. Bacchus

B. Bacchus, Development, grassroots, movement, political

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Trapped in a cycle of ethno-political strife, corruption, and mismanagement by the PPP and PNC

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Follow on Tik Tok @Glennlall

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