Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the death of Dr Cheddi Jagan, founder of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and undoubtedly, the founder of modern politics of Guyana. Before him, politics was dominated by reformist-minded individuals who sought to influence the Legislative Council, which was controlled by the Governor, his ex-officio members and those whom he nominated. These politicians in the main tended to “go along to get along”.
Some may say Cheddi Jagan was the right man, at the right place, at the right time. With the expansion of the franchise in 1947 after the recommendations of the 1938-39 Moyne Commission had been quarantined by WWII, Jagan won a seat to the Legislative Council where he introduced a new vocabulary to politics. Earlier that year, he had helped morph an informal discussion group on topics of the day into the “Political Action Committee”, which helped in his election drive.
The vocabulary he and other members of the discussion honed was based on the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, and focused on addressing the oppressive conditions on the sugar plantations and other work sites. He, therefore, was proposing radical root and branch change, rather than the mild reforms of his predecessors. Jagan had been studying dentistry in the US up to 1943 and was aware of the fundamental changes WWII had unleashed that would shake up the old imperial system under which Guyana had been ruled for centuries.
When the Waddington Commission in 1951 recommended the universal franchise for the next elections in 1953, the PPP had been launched in 1950 to take advantage of the new mass politics that had been unfurled. Jagan’s leadership of the PPP at the 1953 elections garnered all 18 seats, but the radical nature of their rhetoric rattled Britain’s PM, Winston Churchill, who removed the government after a mere 133 days.
We can fast forward through his period of “marking time” from 1953 to 1957, when he was returned to office until he was removed once again in 1964 for the same Marxist radicalism that had earned him his ouster in 1953. Interestingly, he saw his removal as placing “The West on Trial”, which was the name of his autobiography and political activism. He was to be in the wilderness for 28 years as his rival and one-time colleague, Forbes Burnham routinely rigged elections.
While it is a mark of his determination that he kept the PPP intact, but transformed into an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party, many have wondered at what cost. In 1992, he had to jettison all the substantive aspects of that ideology under the “conditionalities” of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) “Structural Adjustment Programme”. These were supposed to pull Guyana out of the financial and social morass into which the previous People’s National Congress (PNC) regime had plunged it. The neo-liberal tenets of that programme unleashed fundamental changes in governance and the economy that are still in place even as the developed world’s economy plunged into a financial crisis in 2008 because of contradictions of the model. Jagan passed away in 1997, before the economy was effectively stabilised.
That task fell to Jagan’s successors and much of the credit for removing a paralysing debt burden and then producing consistent rates of growth exceeding regional peers has to be given to Bharrat Jagdeo who was President for 12 of the 23 years the PPP was in office. Now again out of office, the new leadership of the Party, who happens to be led by the same experienced Bharrat Jagdeo, have signalled the need to abandon doctrinaire ideological “isms”. They have stressed the need to focus on development without losing sight of Guyana’s reality that the majority of the populace remains poor.
As one new leader suggested, “Wealth creation is critical for economic transformation, but must simultaneously improve the stock of the poor and working class whilst reducing the gap of inequality.” While the goal is in consonance with Dr Jagan’s vision, the methodology is refreshingly pragmatic.
