The word “ideology” is not so ubiquitous as in the heady independence and post-independence period when “socialism” of various flavors ruled the local roost. As far back as 1962, Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell, who wrote the seminal “End of Ideology” said he was a “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” Ironically, it was at the same time that US President John F. Kennedy, a Harvard graduate, was using the CIA to oust the claimed “communist fellow traveler” Cheddi Jagan from office.
Three decades later, with the end of the Cold War, another Harvard professor, Francis Fukuyama trumpeted the triumph of Liberalism and its “free enterprise system in 1992 as “‘The End of History and the Last Man”. By then, of course, Desmond Hoyte had jettisoned Burnham’s co-operative socialist experiment and accepted an IMF bailout that was premised on implementing the neo-liberal Washington Consensus ideological package. Jagan and the PPP inherited its Economic Recovery Program of privatization of the nationalized industries, liberalization of the financial system to allow the free flow of funds in and out of the country and stabilization of the domestic economy through controlling inflation, monetary and fiscal policy.
With the collapse of the developed economies in the north by 2008 that initiated the “Washington Consensus” there has been some rethinking about the question of “ideology”. By 2014 Fukuyama had to accept that Liberalism had not delivered on his exuberant promise. In the wake of the Arab Spring’s democratic wave, he posited that that the biggest challenge for the democratically elected governments in some countries was not ideological but “their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth and the basic public services.”
But we would like to suggest that in our specific circumstances in Guyana, while our people – as expressed by their political and social leaders – desire the same valued goods that Fukuyama identified, because of our ethnically fractured polity, any government that hopes to govern and retain widespread legitimacy will have to deliverer the goods in an equitable manner. As such if we consider that the term “ideology is intended to refer to an internally consistent and coherent set of ideas that both explain the world and suggest how we navigate our way in it, then maybe we ought to consider what is the guiding ideology of our present leaders.
One of the attractions of socialist ideology for our early leaders was its promise of “equality” among our citizens with the slogan, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. Unfortunately, the promise was flawed from the very beginning since even Karl Marx accepted that the economy and all its relations has to first pass through a capitalist stage that generates wealth most efficiently. The socialists attempted to distribute wealth – presumably equitably – before accumulating it.
The challenge for us in Guyana as far as development – of our our human and physical resources are concerned – was the necessary capital to develop the infrastructure necessary for a growth trajectory that would lead to sustainable development. The latter demands a diversification of our economy so that all our resources are utilized optimally. Both the government and the opposition agree on this premise as as such it is hoped that our politics would move away from the “position politics” – that is, their stand in a particular constituency – to “valency politics”, where votes are attracted by their stand on identified issues.
With the discovery and exploitation of oil – with at least 20 bbl reserves – at last we will have the necessary capital to launch us on a sustainable growth path. We have also serendipitously arrived at a demographic state where no one party can obtain a majority of votes without seeking votes from outside their core ethnic constituencies. This however demands that the two major parties behave rationally and not emotionally to ensure that there is equality of opportunity to all Guyanese.
