Two years ago, the success of the Movement Against Parking Meters (MAPM) to bring out a wide cross-section of Georgetown to successfully protest the imposition of the said meters by PNC elements in the City Council precipitated murmurs of hope about the possibility of “Civil Society” reasserting itself. But sadly, even as the PNC at the national level started to repeat history by reasserting its hegemonic control over the State through bullyism and the raw exercise of power, civil society appears to have become preternaturally cowed and has refused to raise their hands or heads.
It took some of the leaders of the same organisation, MAPM, whose consciousness had obviously been raised to recognise the responsibility of civil society to return to the streets last week and remind their cohorts of their historic role.
The notion of a “civil society” has an ancient lineage, going back to antiquity. But its present parameters were first outlined after the modern state system was launched in 1646. Since then, “civil society” has been juxtaposed against the potentially predatory state – the Leviathan. Political parties arose in civil society as vehicles for mobilisation to capture the state. But by definition, they were “partisan” and soon were considered at best only liminally part of civil society, and at worse, part of the political order. “Civil society” were those associational elements, in one formulation, mediating between the family and the political order.
During the periods of dictatorship in many countries in the modern period – such as occurred in Guyana during the 1970s – political parties were rendered impotent and ineffectual even though they might not actually have been banned. With elections routinely rigged, political parties in Guyana basically served as fig leaves to “democratic” pretentions. In such a climate, civil society asserted itself against the oppressive PNC Burnhamite Leviathan state.
The political parties made common cause with religious bodies, elements of the business community, trade unions, the Bar Association and other “civic” institutions. As early as 1978, reacting to the PNC’s cynical referendum to end referenda, a wide swathe of civil society mobilised to oppose the imposition and precipitated the lowest turnout in any official polling exercise in Guyana’s history. Many civic society groups were subsequently formed to demand “free and fair elections”.
Against a background of political impotence as late as 1990, with “free and fair elections” in the air, civil society became very active and effective in bringing citizens into the streets. During the upsurge in violence following the 1998 PNC protests, we had elements of civil society – such as the “Social Partners” comprising the Private Sector Commission, the Guyana Bar Association and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) – becoming active. They played a key role in the onslaught against the State run by the PPP at the beginning of this millennium.
But sadly, since 2018, even though we have had the PNC-led Government leading an assault on the fundamental tenet of democracy in refusing to respect and obey the Constitution on the need to hold elections within three months after the successful passage of a no-confidence motion, most of civil society have remained quiescent, if not comatose at the transgression. While the courts are duty-bound to adjudicate cases brought before them – even they can summarily dismiss some as “abuse of process” – all Guyanese know that when the PNC did a volte-face and speciously claimed that 33 was not the majority of 65, when they had been governing on that basis since 2015, they were returning to Burnhamite form. Which is to hold on to power by any means necessary.
It was at this conjuncture when the PNC Leviathan has clearly indicated it was not prepared to follow the tenets of the social contract as embodied in the Constitution, which conferred legitimacy to it, that civil society, should have come out into the streets. It is still not too late.
Unless “civil society” hangs together now, its members will hang separately soon.
