Debate or Denigrate?

The Americanisation of our politics continues apace and we ponder its utility. The latest insistence is that there be “debates” between the major candidates. This phenomenon became a fixture on the American hustings after JFK drubbed Richard Nixon in 1961 and went on to capture the presidency. Essentially, it adopts the “beauty pageant” premises, wherein the candidates are paraded before prospective voters via TV into their living rooms. They are judged on their telegenicity: smiles, nods, winks, well-rehearsed sound bites and audience reaction comprise the elements of the performance.

Our tradition, based on the more substantive British style (we notice that they are also being subverted) has been for our candidates to get in front of real-life voters in meetings across the country and deliver their messages. These messages would have been extracted from their manifestos and customised for the specific audience both in terms of idiom and content. The insistence on the debate format is not the only shift towards superficiality: one party, APNU, has not even offered a manifesto, two weeks before the elections. One has to assume that their programme is still a work in progress.

After several false starts, the four major candidates agreed to participate in a debate organised by the University of Guyana. One would assume that the presidential candidate of the PPP/ C, who had expressed reservations about debates superseding village meetings, assented because of the presumed ambience of a university. After all, what is a university? One authority had declared: “It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge.”

Well, that presumption was unceremoniously thrown out of the window on November 10 when the “debate” finally came off. It was not a debate of ideas, but more of a mob howling for blood as in the days of the Romans gladiators in the Coliseum. Rashness was certainly not rendered innocuous: if anything, it was intensified into vulgarity and gross disrespect of both the occasion and the institution by one of parties – APNU and its partisans.

APNU entered the auditorium with over a hundred screaming supporters. The only image it evoked was that was of a boxer entering a ring with his entourage pumping up the audience for the coming bloodbath. Or maybe that of APNU supporters overrunning the barriers on Nomination Day. What followed only exacerbated the alarming image.

These were not students seeking to discover the programmes and plans of candidates. They were there simply to give vent to their biases and prejudices: a collision of ideas with ignorance. The point of a university is not that a student should not have views, but that he/ she should be willing to subject them to countervailing ones with an open mind. Only in such a process, will learning advance. What we saw on November 10 was nothing more than the baying of closed and narrow minds.

The orientation of a university to other opinions is a liberal one: “I may not agree with your view, but I would die defending your right to express it.” The partisans of APNU, a majority of the students present, had closed their minds and went so far as to drown out the presentation of the PPP/C candidate, Mr Ramotar. They obviously felt that his views do not deserve a hearing. The moderator had to threaten to call in the police to eject them if they persisted with their raucous behaviour.

We will not even invoke the principle of civility that is supposed to govern relations when a guest is on one’s turf. What transpired at UG during the debate does not auger well for the development of a core of free thinkers that can take Guyana forward. It denigrates, not makes, the case for debates in Guyanese politics.