Over the past three years, we have been bombarded by an unremitting stream of incendiary rhetoric emanating from the Opposition and its partisans – even on a trip to Washington, DC. In their daily exhortations to storm the Bastille, the revolutionary narrative immanent in our history (remember Cuffy?), with its supposedly “cathartic” orgies of violence, is invoked.
There are the meta-narratives extolling overthrowing the democratically elected PPP Government through “regime change”.
This fixation on a culture of violence leads to what psychologists call a “grievance-hunting” mindset. It is a pathological condition that betrays a state of mind uniquely incapable of seizing the opportunities and responsibilities of the present, and so must morbidly escape to the past to discover a sanctuary of grievance for itself. The fixation is due primarily to ideologues fixated on past contradictions, and in refusing to rigorously interrogate the present, mechanistically apply answers from that past to circumstances that have changed fundamentally.
Critiques being always strategic, those “answers” are not so much wrong as irrelevant. The “expired strategies” invariably lead to frustration and anger, since even though hard work may be done to implement them, success remains elusive. External malevolent forces and scapegoats are blamed for their failure, and the grievance-hunting mentality hardens.
Take, for instance, their insistence that our ethnically divided society demands power sharing because “majoritarian democracy cannot work”. This is an exemplary instance of refusing to interrogate the present and dwelling only on the past. The “problem spaces” then and now are different: the questions to be posed now must be different, and therefore so might be the answers.
Before the Oct 5, 1992 elections that were just commemorated, Indians had been estimated as more than 50% of the population, and with only a plurality necessary to secure the Presidency and form the Government, we not only accepted the thesis but identified it as the source of an “African Ethnic Security Dilemma”. What would their incentive be to participate in elections where most voted on ethnic lines? They would be legitimising a system where they would be locked out of the Executive in perpetuity.
We proposed innovations such as supermajority governments and Federalism etc. The PNC stuck with the status quo and garnered 42% of the electorate; roughly coincident with the combined African and Mixed groups.
In 1997, the PNC still felt comfortable with the plurality system, and participated in the December elections. They still misread their problem space. After losing once again (but retaining their traditional voting percentage) they precipitated riots (their grievance-mindset recourse) not over the voting system, but over the conduct of the elections. This action only served to harden the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma about physical insecurity. In the ensuing constitutional changes imposed on the PPP, the PNC ignored modification of the electoral or governance structures in willful denial of the exigencies of their problem space.
In the 2001 elections, the PPP once again won – even though ROAR garnered one seat while the PNC maintained its usual percentage. They again precipitated violence and hardened resistance against cross-ethnic support. The PPP, in the meantime, cognisant of the inexorable shrinkage of its traditional base due to higher rates of emigration, maintained its well-oiled electoral machinery and intensified its wooing of the Amerindian and African blocs. The PPP, unlike the PNC, was adjusting to the new problem space. It should not be surprising that in 2006, the PPP repeated its majority even though Indians were then only 43% of the electorate.
In 2010, I advised the Opposition “to forge a strategy and build a mobilization machinery that could deny the PPP a majority. In such a scenario, even if the PPP at best secures the Presidency, they would need Opposition support to govern.” After the PNC and the AFC separately delivered that outcome in 2011, and then made the politically logical move of forming a coalition, the PPP was voted out in 2015.
As a nation of ethnic minorities, Guyana had arrived at the politics of “in and out” through moderation and courting of the “other”, albeit through coalition building.
The PNC/APNU then shot itself in the foot by alienating the Indian Guyanese the AFC had brought in, and continues to do so by essentializing the latter as congenitally incapable of change, and African-Guyanese having no control over being elected into office. Regime change simply delivers recolonization. They have to cast off their debilitating grievance mindset and follow the logic of democratic elections.
