Guyanese politics has been dominated by ethnic mobilisation since 1957, but with the disappearance of the Indian-Guyanese majority, we have witnessed a seismic shift in that orientation by 2015, with the ouster of the PPP government by the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition. A significant number of Indian, Mixed, and Amerindian-Guyanese had to have joined the PNC’s traditional minority African-Guyanese base to push them over the tape.
However, in the present election, the actions of APNU/AFC in government: to peripheralise the Indian-Guyanese segment that had “crossed the ethnic line” to vote for them, could not by itself have caused the PPP to win, as they evidently have, for the PNC to have resorted to such a blatant rigging exercise.
The PPP also had to have been able to attract a significant portion of the Mixed, African and Amerindian votes to do so. This means that, at long last, Guyana is on the cusp of creating a “regular” democratic polity with the introduction of a “swing vote”.
Sadly, the leadership of the PNC are derailing this movement with their retrograde attempts to deny the will of the people from finding expression through their votes to freely select a government of their choice. What they are doing is using a strategy that might have worked at one time, and so to that extent might have been rational. However, in the present circumstance, they are only shooting themselves in the foot to alienate even some of their traditional constituency even further by using the expired strategy.
Granger seemed to have grasped the reality that in Guyana politics had been ethnicised, when he courted the AFC, which had shown that it was able to wrest a significant 10% of the Indian-Guyanese vote that had usually voted for the PPP. But for some inexplicable reason, he ignored the ethnic political consequences of his policy decision in the selection of his Cabinet; members of Government Boards, and in his unilateral decision to shutter four sugar estates and throw 7000 mostly Indian sugar workers on the breadline. What was more ironic was that, in the APNU/AFC Manifesto, the coalition had included the proposal for an “Ethnic Impact Statement” to be issued after every policy initiative.
In Guyana, where the two major groups are minorities of almost equal size, Granger — apparently after assessing his power resources in the Army, Police, Bureaucracy, putatively “autonomous” institutions such as the Judiciary and GECOM, plus the riotous elements in Georgetown — believes he can keep power through confrontation and intimidation. He is cynically exploiting the ethnic security fears of the African-Guyanese segment, and does not care that he is driving away “cross-overs” and “moderates”. Politically insecure leaders like him are more apt to opt for a rigid and aggressive stance to protect themselves from flank group leaders within their parties.
Burnham exploited this fear when he mobilised Africans in the sixties. He constructed a racist, almost totalitarian state, and augmented his power resources by building a massive Disciplined Forces and nationalising 80% of the economy, which he proceeded to staff with members from his African-Guyanese base. He was determined to use the “control”, rather than democratic, option of holding on to power.
Granger has slavishly followed Burnham’s path by once again focusing his “development” plans on the coercive institutions of the state and the bureaucracy. He could not be oblivious to the dénouement of the Burnhamite regime: total ruination economically, socially, culturally, and eventually politically. Granger, however, counted on oil to ensure history’s repetition. But he clearly did not count on the plague that has been visited on the world and not spared Guyana: COVID-19. This has conspired to not only plunge the price of oil to more than half its level from only three months ago, but has made the economy of every country in the world, including Guyana, implode into what may just turn out to be the black hole of a world depression to rival the paradigmatic one of the 1930s.
Granger must go. Only new leadership can save Guyana.
