In a divided polity such as Guyana, the legitimacy of any Government that is not inclusive of the major sections of the populace will inevitably face challenges of legitimacy. This was true in 1992 when the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) ended decades of authoritarian rule by the People’s National Congress (PNC) with 53.5 per cent of the vote and the PNC yet secured 42.3 per cent and is even truer after the 2015 razor-thin victory of the PNC-led A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change coalition that secured 50.3 per cent of the votes as opposed to 49.2 per cent of the PPP.
In such a scenario, it would be prudent for the Government of the day to govern in such a way as to bolster their legitimacy through allowing State structures to function in a neutral manner. But by this measure, the PNC-led coalition has faltered badly. Nothing demonstrates this more vividly that the heavy-handed manner in which the Government has been dealing with the challenges of the sugar industry.
It has never been a secret that the workers of that industry supported the PPP since the first general election of 1953, under the universal franchise. It therefore becomes difficult to explain the unilateral closure of four estates – which involved throwing 7700 sugar workers into the streets – as an effort to staunch subsidies to the industry, when the same quantum is being injected into the rump element, as anything other than an act of political victimisation. Unquestionably, the legitimacy of the Government has been eroded by this distortion of the operations of what was supposed to be an “autonomous” State institution.
But even more alarmingly, it has been the interventions of the PNC-led coalition into the workings of actual State institutions that pose the greatest danger to the dissolution of the glue of legitimacy that holds modern states together and might just plunge Guyana into the abyss from which it was rescued by the PPP in 1992. The Government is yet to respond to the observation by a slew of analysts that the appointment of 16 out of 17 Permanent Secretaries from the traditional PNC constituency presents severe challenges to the impartial standards the Government bureaucracy ought to be held. Permanent Secretaries, in the Westminster system under which we function, ought to be non-political professionals to alleviate exactly such fears.
With the PNC’s sordid history of rigged elections between 1968 and 1985 through the manipulation of the electoral system in one devious way or other, the legitimacy of its present incarnation took a heavy blow when PNC leader and President of Guyana, David Granger violated the letter and spirit of the constitutional strictures instituted to clean up that Augean Stable, by unilaterally appointing his hand-picked octogenarian nominee as head of the Guyana Elections Commission. That blow weighs heavier against the labyrinthine manoeuvrings to control the voter registration process in a manner reminiscent of the 1968 fiasco.
But it has been the PNC-led Administration’s stance against the judicial branch that has most undermined its legitimacy, even among some of its own supporters. It is acknowledged in the Westminster structure of governance, the classical breakdown of the Government into the triumvirate of Executive, Legislature and Judiciary collapses into two, with the fusion of the Executive with its majority in the Legislature. The Judiciary, therefore becomes the ultimate bastion against an immanent dictatorship, through its mandate of Judicial Review to hold the other branches of Government to the strictures of the Constitution.
As such, the moves by the leader of the PNC as President of Guyana to unilaterally appoint the top officers of the Judiciary – in violation of the constitutional requirement – earlier this year generated seismic waves in the populace’s legitimisation quotient – especially when the President cavalierly referred to judgements by one of those top judicial officers as her “perception”. The follow-up blow came with the Attorney General’s quite transparent pressure on the constitutional office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to halt the private criminal charges against two sitting Ministers while allowing identical charges against two ex-officials of the previous PPP Administration.
Quo vadis, Guyana?
