Addressing Parliament immediately after the Opposition PPP had walked out in protest over what they labelled a constitutional violation by him, President David Granger ended a rather partisan speech by extending what some interpreted as an “olive branch”. He said, “Let us hope that despite the absence of the Opposition today, we will continue to search for and find avenues for compromise and consensus.” While Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo dismissed the sentiment as “rhetoric”, because the President had made the same call on several prior occasions without concrete follow-up action, it is still widely accepted by a wide swathe of the country that there is the need for “compromise and consensus” between the two major parties in Guyana if there is to be progress on any of the several metrics by which that term is measured.
One model to facilitate those goals, labelled “executive power sharing”, had been proposed even before we achieved independence, but, for one reason or another, has never been consummated. Cynics suggest that fundamentally neither party has become convinced that it cannot “win it all” on its own, even though that route has not delivered the broad legitimacy to the two post-independence governments that ensured national cooperation to take the country on the path of sustainable development. Before 1992, the PPP talked of a “national unity government”, but baulked after winning the elections, and after 2015, the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition reciprocated by reneging on its identical promise.
When it was in Government, the PPP had proposed that there needed to be more “trust” between the parties when a decade ago, the PNC raised the issue of “power sharing”. The PNC since then has entered into two series of coalitions that presented the opportunity to convince the PPP that it might be willing to share power if the two of them were to form a “grand coalition”. The PNC first invited several minuscule parties, most of them paper organisations, to form the “A Partnership for National Unity”, which most Guyanese accepted simply put “lipstick” on the PNC.
In the second coalition, it engaged in formal negotiations with the Alliance For Change (AFC), which while comparatively small was larger than the PNC’s other partners in APNU. More significantly, it claimed to have a constituency that was outside APNU’s and which fell along the major line of cleavage that presented the original challenge – ethnicity. In a sense, their union could be seen as a dress rehearsal for a coalition with the PPP.
The Cummingsburg Accord summarised their agreement and laid out the forms along which governmental power was to be shared and this is where the PPP could claim its worst fears were realised on the question as to whether it could “trust” the PNC. Moses Nagamootoo had been promised the substantive portfolios of chairing the Cabinet and “governance”, but both of these were hived off and he was left in charge of the Government media, with which he was expected to deal with a “light touch”.
But proponents of power sharing would counter that the PPP is not the small AFC, and the disequilibrium of size between the latter and the PNC/APNU would be more balanced, leading to a more equitable distribution and real power. Without seeking to take away anything from the present coalition Government, it would appear that the lack of institutional memory in Government after 23 years in the Opposition has left it foundering for a response to the widespread economic crisis that has widened to include a crime wave, which its statistics have failed to convince the populace is being brought under control. Talks on “consensus and compromise” with the PPP might offer some answers and, as such, we commend Mr Granger to follow up his bold asseveration in Parliament with action on the ground.
