In the Local Government Elections (LGE) held last month, the PPP claimed they made “significant inroads in PNC strongholds” – read communities dominated by African-Guyanese. The PNC, on the other hand, disputed the significance of any such shift by insisting it was “bought” through massive spending – direct and indirect – in those areas by the PPP government. They predicted the shifts would be transitory, since LGEs are not seen as deciding who governs, and would be irrelevant in the upcoming 2025 General Elections.
While all incumbent governments use their access to the treasury to court voters, in my estimation, the acceptance of the ethnic/racial nature of the voting blocks to be courted by both major parties is a major step forward out of our political logjam. Their insistence, from the beginning of modern politics here, that they were “multi ethnic/racial” was, of course, an implicit acceptance of our social reality. But their further explication that they were blind to racial/ethnic divisions in their policies and actions led to persistent assertions of ethnic/racial discrimination and broad cynicism.
Guyanese elections since 1957 have been categorised – not unfairly – as ethnic censuses, and most Guyanese ruefully shake their heads when alluding to this reality, and wistfully wish, “If only…” Elections are seen as reinforcing our “divisions”, which become flashpoints for ethnic violence. We have been insisting that unless we address the reason for our voting behaviour, our tensions would remain entrenched.
One such reason was proposed by the African-American scholar Michael Dawson, who explained African-American voting behaviour as the logic of “linked fate”. If circumstances, whether systemic or planned, affect a particular set of people specifically and consistently, it is only “reasonable” that it will dawn on them to react similarly to whatever power that determines their fate. And a “group-in-itself” (a statistical category) becomes a self-conscious “group-for-itself”, because of their lived experience.
Historically, our fates were very early on linked to our ethnicity by the differential treatment meted out by the British. Amerindians were allowed to sink back into the “interior”; Africans were enslaved, and then “emancipated” with new mental chains; indentured Indian sugar workers were “ruralised”; while Portuguese and Chinese indentureds were facilitated to carve a niche in the urban and rural retail sector to service a cash economy. It soon didn’t matter whether there were 9 tribes of Amerindians; dozens of tribes from West Africa or North and South Indians: each of those groups coalesced separately, primarily because of their separate linked fates.
With the coming of “democracy”, to allow control of the state through the agglomeration of numbers, the politicians merely followed the ethnic logic and organized along group identities that had already been created. Jagan’s carefully constructed PPP of 1950 was a self-conscious “ethnic coalition”: Ashton Chase stepped aside for the more popular “African-Guyanese” Burnham. The ethnically-channelled political struggle precipitated by Burnham’s departure, however, led to its own problematic that we called our “ethnic security dilemmas”. For the longest, the majority Indian-Guyanese felt that even if they won “democratic elections” at the ballot boxes, they faced an existential threat to their physical security. African-Guyanese, on the other hand, felt that because of their minority status, their well-being was always going to be at the mercy of the not necessarily benevolent majority.
Following independence, “discrimination” became a fact of life following Burnham’s drive to empower himself and African-Guyanese. Whether that discrimination was “racial”, as Dr Jagan accused, or “political”, as Mr Burnham retorted in 1977, or was irrelevant. But with the demographics now creating a nation of minorities, and the African security dilemma resolved, after acceding to office with the assistance of AFC’s Indian-Guyanese votes in 2015, it was an act of political madness for David Granger to fire 7000 mainly Indian-Guyanese sugar workers. On the other hand, it should be considered a positive exercise of political logic for the PPP to actively court both African and Indigenous Guyanese to agglomerate a majority in our democratic polity.
However, the Indian-Guyanese Security Dilemma occasioned by the African-Guyanese domination of the state bureaucracy and armed forces must be addressed openly. The PPP must also issue ethnic impact statements to demonstrate that their policies create equal opportunities in all areas of national life for all ethnic groups, to unlink fates to ethnicity. It should be noted, however, that equality of opportunity does not necessarily translate into equality of outcome, which ultimately depends on individual initiative.
