Democracy is now rooted in Guyana

Today being October 5th, it would be almost transgressive not to at least allude to the “return of democracy” on that date in 1992 after the four previous elections between 1968 and 1985 were massively rigged by the PNC, which they have never officially acknowledged. Since then, we have had seven elections that the PNC invariably disputed, sometimes violently, save the one they won in 2015. In the aftermath of the massive inroads into their traditional African-Guyanese base by WIN in the Sept 1st elections, they have continued to accuse the PPP/C of manipulating the results. They have sought to deny legitimacy to the PPP/C Government conferred by the Guyanese people according to the rules of democracy.
These rules go back to two issues raised in the colonial era when the question of democratic political participation arose – who were “the people”, and once selected, how were they to rule? On the first question, by the 19th century the British had stipulated that middle-class men were “the people”. However, there had to be a period of tutelage in the colonies so that governance could be exercised “responsibly” by us “natives”. So we note a long and painful process of the disenfranchised to win the vote against a determined rear guard action by the British to deny the same. In 1891, new constitution rules enabled the newly enfranchised and growing Coloured/African/Portuguese middle class to gradually outnumber the White planters in the Combined Court. In 1928, when the former demonstrated they had an agenda of their own, the British switched gears and imposed a Crown Colony form of Government where the Governor could effectively outvote the elected representatives. As late as 1947, only about ten percent of the population were 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 a country such as ours incorporated several “nationalities”, forming what would today be called “culturally plural societies”. JS Mill, for instance, speaking from a United Kingdom sure of its “British” national identity in spite of incorporating Scots, Welsh, Irish and English, pronounced definitively that democratic institutions were “next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”. There are undoubtedly numerous issues that the institutionalisation of democracy would pose for Guyana, the most important being the implications of our ethnic divisions for the question of who “the people” are to govern.
Majoritarian politics was born in the Greek city-states, but their 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 countries like Britain that adopted democracy two millennia later. The representatives were supposed to “re-present” those who elected them.
A further innovation was introduced by the British to accommodate local sensitivities by ensuring that residents of “counties” selected their own representatives. This was a procedural basis of the “Westminster” system of democracy, where several candidates compete within a constituency for a seat in Parliament, and one of them could win with a plurality of the votes cast. Guyana practised the constituency system up to the 1961 elections, but in 1964, in a move to remove the PPP, the British imposed Proportional Representation (PR), where the entire country was one constituency and a majority PNC/UF coalition formed the new Government.
Another problem presented by our majoritarian democracy is that even if the party winning the elections were to obtain an absolute majority, why would the minority go along with the majority? The answer is that the minority should know it always has the opportunity of becoming the majority in elections – they simply have to persuade enough fellow citizens that their stance on critical issues coincides with theirs. An early challenge to this “valency politics” was when our ethnic groups voted as blocks, and Indian Guyanese formed a near majority to raise fears of a “tyranny of a majority”.
However, we have become a confirmed nation of minorities since the 2012 census, and to agglomerate a majority of votes, parties have to run on and execute platforms that attract votes from all constituencies. Racial/ethnic exhortations on voting became non-rational. A new fluidity entered Guyanese politics since the 2011 elections, and this reached new heights in the Sept 1st elections after the PPP/C practised and WIN preached this new politics while the PNC vacillated.
Democracy has finally taken root in Guyana.