There have been calls for “power-sharing to reconstitute the Executive Branch of our Government, which directs the state institutions constituted to achieve our overarching goal of a harmonious, prosperous and secure nation. However, the “power-sharers” stubbornly ignore the trees for the forest: that the state’s power is exercised through administrative, legal, extractive, and coercive institutions such as tax bureaus, armies, Police, bureaucracies, judiciaries etc. to direct the activities of “we, the people” – ultimately through coercion of one form or another. And that these institutions might not be passive reservoirs of power, but, in acts of self-reflexivity, can influence and even direct the performance of the Government. Sort of the tail wagging the dog. The power-sharers’ neglect of the state institutions and their operations in our political debates hinders our search for a just political order: they disingenuously want to share executive authority, but not state power.
We have to concede that in our ethnically polarized nation, due to historical circumstances and Burnhamite interventions, most Guyanese state institutions are predominantly staffed by African/Mixed Guyanese supporters of the PNC. And that this poses a challenge to PPP Governments that draw their core support primarily from Indian Guyanese. Many a time a PPP Government official may press a button, but nothing happens at the other end. In terms of the Disciplined Forces in general and the Police Force in particular, one Opposition figure expressed in a 2011 “Riot Act” speech that he was confident that they would not intervene if Africans were to riot. He proved prescient in 2020 and 2022. And this concern is not confined to the coercive apparatus: in the case of the bureaucracy, for instance, their power lies in their ability to craft, shape, hinder or apply policy initiatives of any Government.
I posit that the coercive power immanent in our state institutions and their relative autonomy might be crucial to appreciating the nature and performance of Guyanese Governments of the day. Take the case of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) – which gives expression to the classic Weberian definition of the state itself as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. The Ethnic Riot at Mon Repos last week and in West Berbice in 2020 brought home the failure of this state institution that is mandated to maintain “order” in our country.
The goal of all state institutions should be to serve the interest of all the people: this is the criterion of their fundamental legitimacy. They should be Hegel’s “universal class”. But there will always be the question about their relative autonomy: who or which group controls or has undue influence over the state? To Marxists, it is “the capitalist class owning the means of production”. In Guyana, however, with our ethnicised politics, CLR James’s observation is very apt: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics…but to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”
In Guyana, then, we cannot ignore the ethnic composition of the state institutions when we evaluate the Government’s efficacy. This is not to say that Governments are of no consequence, but to recognise that the Government of the day only has “authority” to direct the state institutions in which power resides, but not the actual power: this is a distinction that is invariably ignored in Guyana.
Representative and professionalised state institutions, such as we have been calling for since 1988, would go a long way towards securing the fair and equal treatment all Guyanese expect from the state. I have been amazed at the refusal of African representatives not to accept this truth. Do they believe that the manoeuvres of the PPP to work around the ethnically (and inevitably politically) skewed institutions bequeathed by the PNC regime are in any Guyanese (including their constituency’s) interest?
Lee Kwan Yu’s singular innovation in transforming multiethnic Singapore into a First World power was because he first addressed the contradictions of his inherited colonial state. In re-staffing his state institutions, he used the facially neutral criterion of merit – even, as from the results, he also had ethnic targets – not quotas. By ignoring the relative autonomy question on monoethnic staffing, we have created our rightfully much-maligned “weak state”, that will ensure the best laid plans of any Government – shared or otherwise – would go awry.
