October 5 passed without much fanfare even though it was the 24th anniversary of “free and fair” elections being returned to Guyana. Starting in 1968, the PNC under Forbes Burnham had rigged elections to thwart the democratic will of the Guyanese people and keep his party in power.
In the post-WWII period, there had been great expectations raised in the minds of the populace that independence from colonial Britain via democratic elections would augur a life of prosperity and dignity for all Guyanese. It was self-evident to the populace that the wealth of the colony had been “drained” to the “Mother Country” and once that “drain” was staunched, it was assumed standards of living had to rise.
That it did not after 1966 – and in fact the Guyanese economy collapsed – made the demands for “real democracy” even more intense. But very early on, however, it was seen that even “democratic elections” were not as straightforward as was thought.
During the lead-up to Independence, British Guiana had the identical method of “democratic elections” as all Britain’s former colonies that would later transition from the “British Empire” to the “Commonwealth”, including Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago that received independence four years before Guyana. This was the “first past the post” (FPTP) method that divided a country into “constituencies” from which a Member of Parliament was elected from a field of party or independent candidates. The virtue of this system, still in use in all the Commonwealth countries, is that it takes democracy closer to the people by having them directly electing their MP to represent them.
The Proportional Representation (PR) method, which was introduced in 1964, treated the entire country as one constituency with two claimed virtues. The first was that it allowed small parties to be elected to Parliament since their support in the total electorate was agglomerated and this also helped reduce the strength of the larger parties.
Secondly, that the representation of the parties in Parliament would be more reflective of their actual support. But because it had been widely discussed even before the 1964 elections, everyone knew PR was simply an “outcome determinative” manoeuvre to remove the PPP from office. This lessened the legitimacy of the Government.
After 1992, there were changes in the Constitution whereby Guyana now has a “hybrid” electoral system with elements of both FPTP and PR and there have been no recent complaints of “exclusion” by political aspirants.
The PPP governed under “free and fair” elections and while there were claims and counter claims of electoral distortions, these have not delegitimised the results of elections. But questions about the efficacy of “democracy” itself as practised were raised on the question of whether its economic promise can be fulfilled.
The challenge is one that arises in all deeply divided societies: while the Government may have received a majority of the votes, its legitimacy is questioned by a large swathe of the populace that did not vote for it. Its practices are also scrutinised for “discriminatory” effects, as rewards to party supporters inevitably follow the cleavages in the society. Thus, directly after the 1992 elections, the PNC strenuously raised cries of “ethnic cleansing” in the Public Service.
Matters escalated after the 1997 elections, and riots and other violence forced President Janet Jagan out of office and created a siege mentality in the succeeding PPP regimes. While the PPP wiped off the debt and maintained a healthy growth rate averaging four per cent during its 23 years at the helm, it was not as high as it could have been if the entire society had put their shoulder to the wheel.
The lack of legitimacy in the new government in the eyes of a large section of the society following the polarising 2015 elections, and the economic stagnation should raise the question whether the adversarial form of democracy should not be challenged by a more consensual one.
