As we reach the end of 2024, it has become de rigueur to be regaled with “the year in review” summaries of what is thought to have been “important” occurrences. But as we enter 2025, in which general elections are due, high on that list must be electoral matters, since elections have been singular events defining the trajectory of our modern history. I return to David Scott’s stricture that demands “histories of the past ought to be interventions in the present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.” While we may agree that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” the history of, say, Haiti is an object lesson on what can happen to a country and people if they don’t act to assist in the bending of that arc.
We examine, then, occurrences around the norms guiding our electoral process last year. The PPP, in government since August 2020, continued using the fortuitous oil revenues – US$5B – in a massive developmental drive that focused on building infrastructure for transportation (roads and bridges); health (hospitals and equipment); education (schools and technical training centres); housing (individual lots and schemes), while ensuring more money reached citizens through cash grants, salary increases, and business grants.
Politically, they accelerated hinterland development that benefits Indigenous Peoples, and continued their now explicit courting of the African Guyanese community. They abandoned their party’s adherence to Marxism-Leninism, which sees ethnic affiliations as “false consciousness”. The old guard has been allowed out to pasture while the incumbents enthusiastically push the new approach and work to assuage concerns in their traditional Indian constituency. The PPP has accepted the political logic of democratic elections in a country where there are no more “built-in” ethnic majorities to mobilize, and they therefore must reach across the old divides.
In the Opposition, the APNU/AFC coalition continued its disintegration, that had begun even while in office. This development was inevitable, since they were a “coalition of convenience”, to remove the PPP from office, and not a “coalition of conviction”, based on a convergence of ideologies or beliefs. Over the last year, the constituents have been flailing around to regroup as a coalition, but have been unable to move beyond the old, opportunistic reason of replacing the PPP government. The sobering experience of the “paper parties”, such as the WPA and GAP, that provided cover for the PNC, and of the AFC which brought real political heft, is proving to be a hurdle that will be difficult to overcome because of the now even more pronounced “disequilibrium of size” between them and the PNC.
What has been most debilitating is the role arrogated by the remnants of the WPA, who continue to cling to the legacy and legitimacy bequeathed by Walter Rodney, as the “intellectual” arbiter of the Opposition’s strategy. Through their presidential candidate, David Hinds, they have articulated an electoral strategy in which the PNC under Aubrey Norton will mobilize the African Guyanese strata; the AFC under Nigel Hughes the Mixed/Coloured Guyanese strata; and the WPA, the Black Consciousness handful. Amerindians in the leadership will mobilize within their community. But the analogous case for Indian Guyanese mobilization was fatally shot in the foot by David Hinds, after Indian Guyanese leaders in the PNC, such as Geeta-Chandan and Ganesh Mahipal etc, were dubbed “slave catchers” for speaking out against a WPA member casting ethnic slurs at their community.
Rationally, they should have been praised, since such a position would have boosted the Opposition’s credentials in a community that had given them the critical push over the winning line in 2015.
Looking ahead to 2025 with elections as the book end, the needed “present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future” demand that all parties not only articulate an electoral strategy that demands courting of all ethnic groups, but must demonstrate such a strategy in their “lived experience”. The WPA is pushing a failed strategy of “culturalism” trumping even political and economic power, only through which lasting structural changes can be made to destroy the systemic inequalities stacked against African Guyanese, they rail against.
While I am not, nor have ever been, a member of the PPP, we have to concede that their present strategy is “helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.”
