After commemorating “Emancipation Day” in grand style, the PNC held its Biennial Congress in preparation for the 2020 general elections. But it is clear it has lost its narrative on constitutional change. In Guyana, even after the abolition of slavery, there was certainly no assumption the freed slaves could vote: the British constitutionally denied the freed Africans the opportunity to control the governing structures.
There had to be a period of tutelage, they insisted, before the responsibility of governance could be exercised “responsibly” by the “natives”. Thus, in Guyanese history, we note a long and painful process by the disenfranchised to win the vote, and a determined rear-guard action by the British to deny it.
In 1891, the British instituted major constitutional changes when they altered the franchise and relaxed the qualifications to vote for the elected officials to the Combined Court. The new rules enabled the new and growing Coloured/African middle class to gradually outnumber the planters in the Combined Court.
The British Government initiated this change because, at that point, its interests diverged from that of the planters; but it was obvious even then that the potential for a new challenge to British Imperial aims had been created.
In 1928, when the Coloured/African middle class showed they may have had an agenda of their own, the British switched gears and imposed a Crown Colony form of government, wherein the Governor could effectively outvote the elected representatives. As late as 1947, only about 10% of the population was counted as “the people”; after 1953, it became everyone over twenty-one; and finally, in 1968, it was changed to include everyone over eighteen.
A second problem arose when, after emancipation, the country became what would today be called a “culturally plural society”. J.S. Mill, speaking from a Britain sure of its “British” national identity, could pronounce with finality that the free institutions of democracy were ‘next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities’.
There are undoubtedly countless issues that the constitutional institutionalisation of democracy would pose for Guyana, but the most important would be to deal directly with the implications of the ethnic divisions in the society, to answer the question, “Who are the people who would govern?”
On another question of how “the people” are to rule, the classical Greeks tried “direct democracy”, where, facilitated by their small numbers, every citizen could vote on every issue in one gathering. If more than fifty percent of the citizens voted for one particular position, then that became the position of “the people”. Majoritarian politics was born.
This direct method of voting had to be abandoned in favour of “representative democracy,” due to the larger number of citizens and their wider geographical dispersion in the countries that resuscitated the democratic form of governance twenty-two centuries later. The representatives were supposed to represent those who elected them. However, even though the circumstances were different, the majoritarian principle was retained, and it was accepted because the British people saw themselves more or less as one. In plural societies like Guyana, it presented new challenges.
If one such faction – such as the “ethnic” groups of Guyana — forms a majority, then this poses a grave danger to democracy in that society — a “tyranny of the majority”.
In this situation, a minority would never have the opportunity of becoming the majority, and would have to go along with that majority ad infinitum. Thus, in such plural societies, where one ethnic group can produce an entrenched majority, “majoritarianism”, a procedure for implementing democracy, becomes an obstacle to the substance of democracy – all citizens feel that their opinions will be taken into account when decisions that affect them are made.
Before the 2015 elections, the PNC had insisted on the need for constitutional change to incorporate a more “inclusionary democratic” approach to governance. Yet, today, they insist the inclusionary goal has been reached under the old constitution. Quo vadis?
