Even though it confirmed the uniethnic bases of the major political parties, the USAID-commissioned Report studiously avoided referring to the issue of “power sharing”. Rather, it spoke of the implementation of previous constitutional reforms: “These can help balance the power of the executive, address the winner-takes-all nature of the political and electoral systems, and devolve power to local government.”
But how does this end the problematic of the legitimacy of governments in a deeply divided racial/ethnic society? In Guyana, the institution of executive power sharing has now seemingly been shelved by its old proponents in the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the Alliance For Change (AFC) even though there is now consensus on its true raison d’etre: the racial/ethnic nature of the parties’ support, which had been lurking unacknowledged under surface all along.
The PNC proposed the power-sharing model for Guyana a decade ago but had always danced around its rationale. If, as it claimed, it represented the all of the groups in Guyana, then the present majoritarian system was unobjectionable, since it was simply a matter of presenting a programme that attracted enough votes to constitute a majority to form the Executive in which all groups would be represented.
“Power sharing” as articulated by the PNC originated in a situation existing in a number of European countries such as The Netherlands and Belgium where religious/ethnic divisions produced entrenched voting patterns.The Executive or Cabinet was shared by all the parties in Parliament and in Parliament there were frank discussions of the interests of the specifically named groups being addressed through bargaining and eventual consensus. The overall approach was given the name “consociational democracy” by one theorist in the 1960’s. Then suddenly, it was moved from a descriptive to a prescriptive status by beleaguered politicians in several divided societies.
A half a century later we have quite a wealth of experience with the transplantation of the consociational model of governance in several non-European societies. One of the earliest clients was Lebanon, which after WWII was divided between Christian and Moslems. One of the weakness of the model – the presumption of immutable groups producing immutable electoral outcomes – was soon challenged when the Muslim minority soon became a majority. The Christians refused to accept the necessity for alterations not only of the distribution of Ministries but more trenchantly, of the quotas that had been instituted in various valued areas of national life. A civil war ensued that has not been ended four decades later.
The model was also applied early on in Malaysia in a governing coalition that included parties of its three major ethnic groups. After riots broke out between these ethnic groups in 1969, quotas were instituted for national participation in business and education. Here, learning from Lebanon, the application was more salutary.
In Africa, where countries inherited arbitrarily drawn colonial borders encompassing large number of ethnic groups, the endemic ethnic hostilities also elicited calls for Executive “power sharing”. However, absent the nationalist outlook, in those countries where it was tried even for one term such as Kenya after riots in 2007 and in Zimbabwe in 2008, it was abandoned. Power sharing meant only sharing the of the national patrimony. This would have necessitated the introduction of quotas which could never be agreed on.
While the present Government has on occasion claimed it possessed the necessary qualifications to be considered a “government of national unity”, this claim falls flat when it acknowledges accomplished this through the participation of the AFC which was supposed to bring in 11 per cent Indian Guyanese votes. But what it actually did do was to implicitly concede that power sharing in Guyana will have to be accomplished by ensuring the representatives of substantial blocks of the major radial/ethnic blocks are in the “grand coalition”.
This implies two prerequisites in Guyana, the inclusion of the People’s Progressive Party and the introduction of quotas. Is this what killed “power sharing”?
