Now that Nomination Day is over, we know that there are thirteen parties – down from the nineteen that had declared their intention and symbols – that will be contesting the March 2 General and Regional Elections. It is possible that that number may be further reduced since the GECOM Secretariat would have scrutinised the lists for duplications and other transgressions of the rules of the nomination process. Only three of the parties were able to field candidates in all ten regions and as such claim to be “national” parties.…
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The Elections campaign
The holidays are over and the country is currently in elections mode. The elections campaigns are becoming more intense as the various parties vie for political power at the March 2 polls. Both major political parties – the APNU/AFC and the PPP/C have already launched their campaign. For many, these elections are viewed as the ‘mother of all elections’ as the stakes are very high considering the direction Guyana will be taking as the country explores fully the oil and gas sector. While it is normal for political parties to…
Read MoreHistories for healing, not fighting
Last week, I started to look back at events that occurred at the end of the second decade of the 20th century, when there were initiatives to launch a “Colonisation Scheme” to bring additional labour to Br Guiana in light of the ending of indentureship in 1917 and a “labour shortage” in the sugar industry. Before continuing, I would like to offer a perspective which I have expressed before on my histological perspective in doing so. Histories, after all, are always written within a particular “space of experience” – the…
Read MoreA new beginning for Indian Guyanese
This New Year’s Day is very significant in the history of Guyana: it the 100th anniversary of the abolition of all Indian indentures in 1920. Three years before, on March 12, 1917, “Indian Indentureship”, as an institution, had been abolished but those who had already been shipped out – including those on the SS Ganges, the last ship to British Guiana which landed on April 18, 1917 – would have had to serve out their five or three-year indenture. On Jan 1, 1920, then, every Indian who had arrived as…
Read MoreChanging politics in Guyana
Whatever their faults, our parties, like parties everywhere, do not merely affect, they also reflect the nuances of their societies. So the “fault” – if there is any – might also lie in ourselves. Politicians cannot lead followers wherever the politicians want them to go, for followers will only go in directions they find preferable to the alternatives available: leaders can catalyse but not initiate ethnic reactions. Political parties arose in a Europe that had already “solved” its ethnic problem by transforming it from a national question into an international…
Read MoreState to deliver the good life
We hope with the official launch of the campaigns, the major parties will make their position clear on the role of government in the development of the economy. Do we continue with the neo-liberal “night-watchman” state we accepted with the IMF’s Washington Consensus in 1989? Or do we accept the latter’s changed position of the present, where they took heed of the collapse of the model in 2008 and proposed the more interventionary state model from the Far-Eastern example of Japan, South Korea et al? With the imminent coming of…
Read MoreForeign Affairs fiasco
The dust is still settling on the incendiary intervention caretaker President Granger lobbed into the country’s Foreign Affairs establishment last week with his extensive firings of Ambassadors and removal of its Director-General. But it is already clear that the damage inflicted comes at a critical juncture of our history. The rationale offered by the caretaker – that he is seeking to replace long-serving diplomats with younger, career personnel – does not withstand scrutiny, since his hand-picked Ambassador to Cuba is quite long in the tooth and is not a career…
Read MoreScapegoating sugar
Because of its ethnicised workforce due to historical circumstances, the sugar industry has been used by the People’s National Congress (PNC) as a trope for accusing the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) of making decisions based on political or racial considerations, to favour its traditional base. The decision to embark on the Skeldon Modernisation Project, which included a new factory, has been severely criticised by the PNC when in Opposition, conveniently ignoring that the project was approved by all stakeholders including the World Bank (as a lender) and the European Union…
Read MoreVoting in the next elections in Guyana
Last week, we wrote about voting patterns in Guyana and what we may expect on March 2, next year. By 1992, the left-right ideological divide had disappeared and it surprised some when in the elections of that year after the PNC had brought the country to its knees, it yet received 42.3% of the votes cast – even surpassing their 40.5% garnered in 1964 – the last free and fair elections. The WPA, which some thought had broken the back of “racial voting proclivities” because of the multiracial crowds they…
Read MoreManifestos and voting in Guyana
The release of manifestos is as much a part of the Guyanese electoral scene as “bottom house meetings”: both are geared to persuade the voting public where to put their X’s on elections day. With the former, the party offers in writing a “plaster for every sore” that afflicts the body politic but hopefully imbued with an overarching, comprehensive vision. “Bottom house” meetings, are more about informing the party faithful why not to vote for other parties and are generally no-hold-barred affairs, exemplified, for instance, by PNC Chair Volda Lawrence’s…
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