The PNC is once again paralysing the development of democratic politics in Guyana. When Guyana was about to receive independence from Britain, the latter introduced a Proportional Representation (PR) electoral system for citizens to exercise their franchise and elect a government of their choice. While they had their own reasons for jettisoning the First Past the Post (FPTP) system that was standard in their country and their colonies, PR did have the virtue of increasing the representation of minorities in Parliament.
This presented the PNC, in the first elections under PR in 1964, with the opportunity to enter into a coalition with the minority United Force, which was ideologically capitalist and aggregating a wide cross section of the ethnic spectrum as opposed to its predominantly African and Mixed Guyanese base. While the British accomplished its aim to exclude the PPP – which it concluded was pro-Moscow – the expectation was the PNC would be forced to moderate its ethnic and leftist orientation to retain the support of the UF to remain in Government.
The PNC’s fateful decision to rig the elections of 1968 resulted in the UF leaving the coalition but the decision was moot, since the PNC awarded itself a majority allowing it to rule exclusively. Democratic politics – in right of the people to chose their representatives in Parliament and Government was stillborn. Fast forward to 1992, when a confluence of international factors and a moderation of the PPP’s leftist line ushered in “free and fair elections”, the complaint from some quarters was that the PPP’s built-in majority from its Indian-Guyanese base did not offer any incentive for them to be inclusive in their governance.
The PPP insisted that it its policies were facially neutral and that their programmes helped to reduce the poverty levels among African Guyanese by a greater quantum than Indian Guyanese – as shown by Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) in 1992, 1999 and 2006. It was Indigenous Peoples who still lagged significantly in the rising tide created by the PPP’s economic policies. The PPP was able to raise Guyana’s standing from a low income, Highly Indebted Poor Country, into an Upper Medium Level Income country.
A higher rate of emigration by Indian Guyanese coupled with a lowered birth rate, however, served to move them from being a 51% majority in 1980 to a 39.5% minority in the 2012 census. Those numbers were exacerbated in the 2011 elections when the AFC managed to attract a significant percentage of voters from the Indian Guyanese demographic so that the PPP was only able to secure the Executive through the peculiar feature of the Guyana constitution that simply requires a plurality to accomplish this feat.
The PNC-as-APNU seized the opportunity presented and, in a repetition of the 1964 elections, coalesced with the AFC to secure the necessary majority to oust the PPP from office. At long last, Guyana was now practicing democratic politics without the distortion of built-in ethnic majorities, which cause excluded groups to develop resentment against the political system and seek extra-parliamentary options.
The PNC/APNU/AFC coalition, however, launched disastrous policies in all areas of national life – especially economically and socially. While it launched a “social cohesion” program with an attendant ministry, its policies alienated groups outside its base because of the adverse impact of those policies on them. Particularly insensitive were its appointments in all areas of governance and the arbitrary closure of four sugar factories that threw 700 mostly Indian Guyanese workers into the breadlines.
These adverse factors of a stagnating economy combined with the alienation of a significant demographic, served to deliver a stinging defeat to the coalition at the Local Government Elections (LGE) which appears to have been repeated in the March 2 General Elections. The PNC’s resort to the ongoing “bare-faced” rigging attempt presents a clear danger to the development of a democratic political culture in our country.
It is clear that, as in 1992, only the intervention of the US can halt that retrogressive step.
