Winston Churchill, Britain’s famous wartime leader against fascism, famously remarked, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” The point he was making, of course, is that while democracy might have its flaws, in the real world, no other system has better delivered the “good life” to citizens. He was prophetic, since, in the wave of decolonisation that followed WWII, almost all the countries that flirted with other systems eventually had to reintroduce democratic rule.
One scholar of democracy, Larry Diamond, had defined democracy as “system of government with four key elements: i) A system for choosing and replacing the Government through free and fair elections; ii) Active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; iii) Protection of the human rights of all citizens; and iv) A rule of law in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.” But maybe after our lived experiences as a people, Guyanese might resonate better with the view of philosopher Karl Popper, who contrasted democracy with dictatorship or tyranny. We know what we do not want in terms of our leaders, to wit, that concrete opportunities to control them must be available.
These opportunities have been institutionalised as “National Elections”, which are held at specified intervals; in our case, every five years. These serve to legitimise the rulers and confer on them the authority to govern in accordance with the Supreme Law of the land – the Constitution. Credible National Elections, therefore, are a threshold issue that must be crossed before we address any other issue when it comes to dealing with democratic rule in nations. While it has been noted that democracy has substantive characteristics, such as justice and equality etc, unless the leaders governing the state are elected through democratic procedures, those substantive elements will inevitably be subverted. A benign democratic dictatorship is an oxymoron.
This was tried by the PNC under Forbes Burnham, and it is crucial to note that he started by rigging the 1968 elections, and did so by subverting the Elections Commission through his control of its Chairman and other officials. As such, when “free and fair” elections were returned to Guyana through the combined efforts of the Guyanese people – domestic and foreign – and the international democratic community, the Elections Commission and the electoral mechanisms were at the centre of the reforms. The Commission was constituted with six Commissioners – three each being from the Government and the Parliamentary Opposition – and a Chair, nominated by the Opposition Leader and approved by the President. The arrangement from the onset placed great store on the bona fides and impartiality of the Chair, who would possess a de facto casting vote.
The PNC, however, never accepted democratic norms. At the very next elections in 1997, they demonstrated their democratic bad faith after initially accepting in Parliament that National ID Cards should be used to validate voters, then duplicitously somersaulting to challenge its constitutional bona fides. The elections were subsequently invalidated in the High Courts by Justice Claudette Singh, but by then had become moot, since the PPP had been bludgeoned by PNC street protests to excise two years from their 5-year term.
The attempt to stack the deck of GECOM to vitiate democracy returned to the fore after 2015, when the PNC was returned to office in a coalition. The unilateral appointment of the Chair by President Granger heralded this undercutting, and was confirmed by the latter’s compromised selection of the GECOM Secretariat’s DCEO. Both actions were later ruled as illegal by the CCJ. The blatant attempt to rig the long-delayed elections of March 2 2020 was only stymied through the support of the international democratic community.
The long-drawn-out process to replace the officials of the GECOM Secretariat has finally resulted in the selection of the CEO through the working of the agreed institutional rules. All Guyanese must draw a line in the sand against further attacks on our democratic system.
