Governance and equitability cannot be accomplished in a timely manner, if ever, without serious constitutional reforms

Mar 05, 2024 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Every so often in letters to the editor, former prime minister Hamilton Green has been imploring the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) to abandon its evil ways and adopt good governance if it wishes to build ‘One Guyana’. The response of the PPP and its supporters has been generally negative: regurgitating the usual PPP propagandistic tit bits about the People’s National Congress and Mr. Green’s dictatorial history. Mr. Green seems to have lost patience: recently in a piece entitled ‘Effectiveness of a Constitution dependent on personnel in captain’s deck on the ship of state’ (VV,11/02/2024), he exhibited this frustration to the point of suggesting that only God can help Guyana!

Green claimed that bothering with constitutional reform ‘is a complete waste of time, energy and money’. We live in a terribly administered country and time and energy will be best directed at overcoming these deficiencies. Whatever remaining energy we have should be directed towards our religious organisations, the home, the school, and the community. Guyana needs ‘Men and women of integrity willing to practice what they preach, willing to be faithful to a constitution, men and women who truly believe in righteousness, men, and women with a moral sense.   In other words, ‘let us in our mosques, temples, churches, work feverishly to affect an attitudinal change and inject into the veins of those who lead to have a moral sense. …It is not what is in the Constitution. It is to get men and women of honour and rectitude to lead our nation.’

Perhaps unwittingly, he is taking the position of those, particularly in the PPP, who are set upon ethnic dominance and do not wish to make strong constitutional arrangements to protect the interest of Africans and other ethnic groups. Those who absurdly would have us believe that notwithstanding decades of knowledgeable advice about the nature of countries like ours, long-standing suggestions from sources such as the Carter Center and now the US State department, the constitution is good but it is the politicians that are bad. Therefore, rather than immediately making fundamental changes to the constitution, let us leave the bad politicians to operate the good constitution until the politicians change their bad ways and can manage the good constitution in an equitable and sensible manner!

Well, his recommendation is utopian twaddle and at a practical level it is simply not possible for a longstanding political activist such as Hamiliton Green to relinquish immediate political results. So, according to Vincent Alexander from the floor of the annual symposium of the Forbes Burnham Foundation late last month, Green ‘sarcastically concluded that in the circumstance of being accused of rigging and given the crassness of the regime, then rigging may well be resorted to in an effort to save the country from the disregard for democracy and the lives of people by the PPP ‘devils, bastards, and demons’(KN:25/02/2024).

Mr. Green has apparently apologized for his outburst, and this is good. But so far as I am concerned, a sufficiently dictatorial regime must be confronted at any level, so I do not contribute to the PPP’s highly questionable propagandistic disdain for electoral manipulations. In 1956, the Governor of British Guiana went to London for consultations and returned with a constitution that was clearly designed to rig the PPP out of government. According to Cheddi Jagan, ‘We protested against this allocation to the Chief Secretary Derek Jakeway. We pointed out that it was aimed at helping those opposed to us, that in the greater Georgetown area where Burnham was entrenched, 5 seats of 1953 were combined by this ‘gerrymandering’ into 3, while in our area of strength in eastern Berbice 31/2 seats were combined into 1. That Berbice constituency had 31,947 votes compared with 5,879 for the town of New Amsterdam. Jakeway admitted that the object was to defeat us and did nothing about our protest’ (Cheddi Jagan (2004) ‘The West on Trial’, Harpy).

Of course, given the behaviour of some PPP members, the West and their allies had already identified those in the PPP whom they believed were Soviet-type communists and perhaps also had in their possession Cheddi’s 1951 letter to the Communist International suggesting that ‘British Guiana will … most likely play the leading role in any future development of the Caribbean Area and… As such, a strong militant party in British Guiana is vitally necessary.  The balance of power in the Executive Committee of the party is with the communists’ (SN: 11/04/2023). Communism was about the global destruction of liberal democracy and so far as the West was concerned, one cannot legitimately use democracy (majority rule) to end democracy. I agreed with and still hold to this position.

Mr. Green purports that the present constitution is good. So, let us say that like the British and their allies, he is successful in rigging the PPP out of office, where are the good men and women with whom to replace it? Whatever he may think of the PNC, he certainly knows that half this country thinks very badly of it and can make a creditable case for their position, even without reference to the PNC’s most recent performance. Furthermore, to many in the PPP, the leadership of the PNC is made up of some of the most vicious ‘devils, bastards, and demons’.

When one honestly expresses a position that runs counter to one’s interest, I consider it the result of a poverty of thought. As suggested above, Mr. Green was rightly uncomfortable with the position he had adopted and he pleaded, ‘If someone can tell me what changes in our Constitution can alter this fact (that making changes would be a waste of time), I will readily change my position’.

Globally, nowhere are politicians as a group thought of as ‘men and women of great honour and rectitude’, but it does not take much to recognise that in the context of Guyana, if, somewhat like Suriname, the constitution had required a 2/3 majority vote in the National Assembly for someone to become the president and/or pass the national budget, government/ opposition relations would have been much different. Similar changes that will force positive behavioural changes in the wicked politicians could be made in relation to the all-important judiciary and a whole range of other issues.

Religion and ethnic allegiances are much stronger when compared to loyalty to ideologies and the present relationship between Ukraine and Russia is a good example. Over decades, ethnic fidelity has made Guyana into a country with two competing political visions. The task, Mr. Green, is to arrange and optimally manage this context with people as they are and not as you would like them to be. When you take this on board you will come to realise that good governance and equitability cannot be accomplished in a timely manner, if ever, without serious constitutional reforms.

Sincerely,

Dr. Henry Jeffrey

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• Dr Henry Jeffrey, Hamilton Green, manner, People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Serious

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