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Oct 46, 2002: SYMPTON AND CAUSE
Today marks ten years of power for the PPP. At the moment that power is under intense, torrid, and violent siege. In present day Guyana, when people gather to discuss politics, two brief statements preface their interaction - Guyana has collapsed and the PPP government is likely to fall. How does an analyst account for this cul-de-sac after ten years in power? There is no scope in a newspaper column to assess the PPP's ten years of the exercise of power. The condensation of such an evaluation in one article will do structural damage to the explanation and readers will be left totally dissatisfied with the gaping holes in an abbreviated argument. This task is best achieved in an academic presentation. I will spread my examination over three articles today, Sunday and conclude on Monday. For those readers who are inclined to digest a more intellectual expansion, I suggest you attend the Inter-Guiana Conference to be held later this month at the University of Guyana. I will present a research paper at that meeting in which a more complex approach to the title of this article will be outlined. An analysis of the vagaries, vicissitudes, inexplicabilities, naiveties, strengths and weaknesses follow.
In looking at the causes of historical and social phenomena, the safest methodology to use is a multi-causal explanation. Many historical events have a single cause but it would be safe to say that history is not that simple; interconnected factors hold the key to understanding what moves history. In comprehending the personality make-up of Guyana's oldest political party, many analyst tend to focus on political and ideological reasons but very few tend to look in the direction of psychology. In this first installment, I postulate that a myth buried deep into the psyche of the PPP will help elucidate the strange things the PPP did and does, the mysterious paths it has taken, and the incomprehensible ways it looks at Guyana, its politics and its people.
Is the PPP fascist, semi-fascist, authoritarian, and racist? The answer is no. There is certainly arrogance present, and corruption is there to seen. Incestuosness, a touch of oligarchic politics, party favouritism and plain old fashioned spitefulness run through the physiology of the PPP. But these traits do not make the PPP any different from other parties around the world including the PNC. It is a hopeless fool who believes there is a good guy/bad guy difference between these competing foxes. I always remember how Eric Phillips sent the bells of paranoia ringing deafeningly in the ears of Freedom House when before the ink could dry on Jagdeo's swearing in papers, he, Phillips called for power-sharing. Yet Phillips was a candidate for a party that contested elections without even whispering about the possibility of power-sharing during the campaign. Then bingo! The PPP won, and PNC leaders were chanting a nightly mantra on Channel 9 about the exigency of power-sharing.
This is the PNC. Tomorrow the PNC gets into power, and in a style typical of the PPP, a PNC Vice-Chancellor is going to touch down at UG, PNC- inclined lawyers will be appointed judges, scholarships will to special constituencies, certain businessmen on the PNC's slate will get enormous contracts worth billions of dollars, jobs for the boys will return, and that inviting smile of Forbes Burnham will spread its wings over the Botanic Gardens. There are Nathoo's and Rupa's liming spots that are strictly inhabited by PPPites. Who says the boys in the PNC don't have their liming dens? You may not like the PPP, but don't deceive yourself; the boys in the PNC can't wait to devour the power they once enjoyed for almost three decades. Ask me about the PNC's love for democracy. Don't forget I work at UG where PNC power is all over the campus and one thing is certainly missing from UG democratic respect for fair play
There is a psychological imprint of the PPP however, and this differentiates it from all other political parties in the world. It is a psychic motif that forms part of the PPP's personality and it has led the PPP and Guyana to the stage the country is at the moment hanging by a thread above a huge cliff where Hades await the citizens who fall below. When one searches through the myriad of causal explanation, if your research paper overlooks this characteristic, then a hole will appear. The PPP believes that it has a national destiny to lead Guyana. It believes that this is the mission of Cheddi Jagan when he returned from studies abroad and this was the reason the PPP was formed. Out of this psychological interpretation of its personality, a natural spin-off is to see others as being deliberately scheming when they oppose the PPP and the PPP government.
Few people in this country know that the title of Burnham's edited work by Burrowes and Nascimento was chosen by Burnham himself, A DESTINY TO MOULD. This is where the Burnhamite PNC meets the Jaganite PPP. They both believe in a manifest destiny. Burnham had total contempt for Jagan. He internalized his childhood fantasy and made it into reality. He knew he was brighter than Jagan, he knew he was the smartest among his contemporaries, and he dismissed the ideological inflexibility of the PPP as stupid bravado. He took Guyana into independence and as his rule stretched on, the power of manifest destiny took over him. After a decade in power, Burnham knew that he had done what he was destined to do run and control Guyana. For Burnham, the PNC was Guyana and Guyana was the PNC. This legacy lives on in Burnham's protégés, particularly Robert Corbin and Hamilton Greene This is the danger of party politics in Guyana both parties believe in national destiny. Academic honesty demands though that one demarcates the lines here. The Jaganite legacy of national destiny is fully intact in the PPP where it is jealously guarded. In the PNC, that legacy has been seriously eroded by the seven-year rule of Desmond Hoyte. In today's PNC, there is more scope for the iconoclastic Raphael Trotman whereas the PPP's radical liberal, Khemraj Ramjattan fights for daily survival.
Along the way, as the PPP's national destiny worked itself out, three confrontationists stood in the way - western capitalism, the People's National Congress and the Public Service Union. The psyche of the PPP is attached to a fear in which images of these three antagonists are fighting to wrest control of Guyana from the PPP. The PPP could not have done anything about western capitalism but the PPP felt justified when the west finally conceded PPP's control of Guyana. A creeping triumphalism came about, and among PPP stalwarts was the talk that it had to happened one day. For this reason, the PPP will never erase the marxist-leninist paragraph on its constitution. To do that is to concede defeat to western capitalism, and the PPP was not defeated. For the PPP, it had to return to power. History destined that. And returned to power it did.
BLOOD THAT WAS SHED
If a political organization has a messianic vision of itself, if it determines that its divine purpose is to shape the future of the territory to which it is attached, three characteristics emerge, and become integral, (1) an ideological inflexibility, (2) a superior culture, (3) an inevitable paranoia. When these syndromes step in, a gradual alienation from society begins, perspectives get confused, and the organization eventually declines. This is what happened to the Forbes Burnham regime from the 1978 referendum to his death in 1985. There was no one around to help Burnham rearrange the confused perspectives although shortly before his death, he made an attempt to talk to Washington. The PPP is drowning in the same dilemma as it celebrates its decade in office. Fortunately for the PPP, the world has people that can throw a lifeline to it, three names come immediately to mind Nelson Mandela, Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter.
These three personality traits are the essential framework one must use to determine why the PPP government is facing the erosion of power. The attribute of ideological inflexibility is of lesser intellectual value for an understanding of the present moment so I will look at the role of the PPP's superior culture. There have been three tragic political mistakes in modern Guyanese politics, two of have directly contributed to social decay. Here I make a distinction between political decisions and economic issues because the dissolution of the train service was a monumental mistake. They are: (1) Burnham's agreement reopen our border problem with Venezuela, (2) the assassination of Walter Rodney, (3) the ostracisation of the pro-democracy forces, especially the WPA, after the 1992 election. This third mistake is, to my mind, the greatest tragedy that has befallen this nation. This omission lies at the heart of the cul-de-sac Guyana now faces.
After the 1968 election, Burnham's manifest destiny had to lead him, his party and Guyana into troubled waters. The PPP stood alone in opposing Burnham's drift to Latin American oligarchic violence. With the arrival of Rodney and the WPA, new nuances of anti-Burnham politics were born. The PPP began to drift into second place. The PPP resented this displacement for two reasons; first, the WPA tended to emphasize strategies that the PPP deemed middle class, petty bourgeois radicalism which the PPP felt was far inferior to communist manoeuvres, and secondly, as part of this, the WPA was seen as an inferior organization (see Cheddi Jagan's article in THUNDER, July-Dec, 1971). From the time MOA (Movement Against Oppression) which collapsed into the WPA came on the scene, bad blood showed itself between these two organisations. The historical myth that the PPP lives with, and which drives it to obsession is the fact (which in is fact an illusion), that it defeated PNC authoritarianism in Guyana. The PPP did not defeat PNC authoritarianism, it contributed in a major way. But the PPP would never accept this. This is the mental dilemma East Indians find themselves in. Indians are running from this reality, and the time has come for them to accept it, including Indian rights groups like ROAR and GIHA.
The PPP's disdain for the WPA after 1992 borders on evil. When one think about the blood that was shed by the WPA for Guyana to be freed, then the use of the word EVIL is appropriate. WPA people have been tortured, brutalized and murdered. Countless numbers have been humiliated, harassed and denied employment. You can literally count on your fingers the PPP people who have bruised by PNC authoritarianism from 1968 to 1992. WPA members were the threats, the enemies, the destabilisers. PPP people were regarded as estate rebels who burned cane and could be tolerated. Does anyone out there know why Clement Rohee or Roger Luncheon was not killed but Walter Rodney was? When WPA teachers like Andaiye and others were dismissed from Georgetown schools, PPP teachers were working comfortably in rural schools. While Rohee and Ramotaur were spending a five- year stint in Czechoslovakia, WPA people were jail stints in Georgetown, some of these were David Hinds, Tacuma Ogunseye and Geoffrey Sage. Hinds almost went blind in jail. Can someone point to similar suffereing on the part of the PPP members? To understand the reasons why Clive Thomas and Tacuma Ogunseye have done and said politically the past few years, you have to get into their minds. Thomas was a first-class intellectual who took on Burnham and Hoyte. I saw Ogunseye virtually engage five policemen in the courtyard of the Georgetown Magistrate precinct at the trial of Eusi Kwayana. I don't agree with their switch to ethnic politics but they remain Guyanese heroes and they deserve the respect of the Guyanese people, especially Indian Guyanese. Look at the treatment of Dr. Josh Ramsammy? The PPP finds him unfit to have a second term as Pro-Chancellor. Someone by the name of Albert David wrote recently that GAP rescued the WPA from the bowels of the ocean. David, of course is to stupid to know that the WPA rescued him from enslavement so he can write his insulting letters. The name should not deceive one; David is an Indian who write from abroad. This is the self-reflection that Abu Bark is asking Indians for but is not getting. Indian people have forgotten who liberated them from PNC rule. I have dealt with this is my research paper for the upcoming meeting of the Inter-Guianas Conference at UG on October 22 25.
I have heard PPP leaders speak of WPA not knowing its place, and that they were latecomers. But what did the PPP deliver to the Guyanese people from 1968? They couldn't deliver Burnham. God did; Burnham died peacefully at the Georgetown hospital. The irony of it all is that what the WPA delivered in a shirt period of time, the PPP couldn't produce in decades the inability of the PNC to continue its authoritarian ways. By the end of the, the pro-democracy forces were making life unbearable for the Hoyte administration. Father Morrison, Yesu Persaud, the GHRA under Mr. Mike Mc Cormack, the Catholic Church, the Council of Churches, the break away TUC group FITUG with Lincoln Lewis and others had by this time opened up distinct possibilities for regime change in Guyana. In 1992, the PPP was the main beneficiary. How the PPP behaved after 1992 constitutes a departure from revolutionary behaviour in history. Throughout history, when authoritarian forces remove authoritarian regimes, there is an automatic response of deep respect and gratitude for those who fought. Not so in Guyana. Even though many of the great anti-dictatorship radicals did not participate in electoral politics in South America after the military regimes were swept away, there is still an institutionalised respect for those who fought bravely the men in uniform. In Guyana, the PPP belief in their superior political culture led them down a path of disdain, disrespect for and denial of the WPA. It was a huge human error.
WARSHIPS IN THE HARBOUR
Yesterday, I examined one of the inherent characteristics of the PPP the PPP's conceptualization that it is the foremost political organization in Guyana and has been so from the fifties. In this the concluding segment of my analysis, I examine a natural spin off of this dimension of the PPP's personality paranoia. I contest that if the PPP was able to deal with this psychological fixation and sublimate it, then Guyana would have been a model country for democratic inclusiveness. I end the column when the nature of the PPP's power in this most distressing moment in the life of the perplexed people of Guyana.
Paranoia has been a continuous threat running through the history of the PPP. There may be some justification for this. What cannot be justified is the PPP's refusal to see that in the concatenation of events since the sixties, they have frequently turned the train in the opposite direction on a one- way track. The PPP refuses to accept that some of their horrible mistakes have led to some of the vicious attacks that have visited them since the early sixties up to the present moment. And this has severely damaged Guyana.
The PPP, in its long history of evolution, has been harassed to the point of collapse. From the time the constitution of British Guiana was suspended through to the sixties and into the nineties, the PPP has had to fight for its survival. It is desperately fighting for it now and is holding on for dear life. It is only natural then, that the syndrome of paranoia would creep in. For the Jagans and other PPP leaders, the sixties was a vulgar conspiracy to oust the PPP by two sets of forces. Western capitalism wanted the Jagans out because it was a Marxist regime. The PNC and the PSU sought its removal because it was an Indian based party. The PPP since then has lived with this twin suspicion of the PNC and the PSU and the fear of anti-communism.
That suspicion has been fed just months after the PPP returned to power in 1992 when the PSU called a strike at Customs House. In 1999, another PSU strike almost toppled the government. The PNC pursues a relentless ambition of power-seeking from 1997. The PPP's paranoia is now out of control. How can one blame a party whose history has been so turbulent for being overly suspicious? But this insecurity is a runaway train. It has destroyed the psychic integrity of the PPP's leadership. PPP leaders judge every human being using two criteria one is, how deep is your anti-communist views, the second one is if you are not a PPP, then you cannot be in support of us. The present deportment of the PPP so closely resembles the last days of Burnham's crumbling empire. Burnham trusted no one, not even his trusted lieutenants. Paranoia had destroyed the ability to judge.
The PPP has neatly and nicely fed its supporters on the theory of the barbarians at the gate. Innocent young men and women are fed on a diet of PPP critics are enemies who want to remove them from power. In this mental dead-end, there is no scope for an independent presence. But more than this, even within the PPP house of families, a fresh thinker, a well-meaning iconoclast is seen as inimical to the party's interests. I have heard denigrating comments about Raphael Trotman by PNC insiders. I have seen furious remarks by these same insiders of how impertinent Trotman is to think that he could overnight take over the PNC. But I have never heard an anti-Trotman statement that questions Trotman's commitment to the PNC. PNC stalwarts feel that Trotman must wait or that he hasn't good leadership qualities. The situation is different in the PPP with Trotman's counterpart, Khemraj Ramjattan. PPP insiders feel that Ramjattan has a hidden agenda. One PPP central committee member told me that he is the rebirth of Balram Singh Rai and he is out to destroy the PPP. Another central committee member verbally accosted me for writing a panegyric of Ramjattan for the Sunday issue of KN, the very day of the PPP's congressional election August last. He was visibly annoyed.
I believe it is this extensive and intensive distrust of non-PPP people that is at the heart of
the incompetence that has enveloped the PPP's administration. Guyana has a small population without a large human resource base. That base was severely depleted by the era of PNC authoritarianism. Both Guyana and the PPP are thus severely lacking in skilled, talented and bright people. What little of this is left had to be tapped, especially from 1997, but the paranoia of the PPP has virtually killed this possibility. There is a formidable intellectual rebuttal to this explanation here, and maybe a few words about it are in order. Some have postulated that a collapse was inevitable because the PPP's political culture is no different from the PNC's and a river of other mediocre parties around the globe. This model posits a theory of power domination, and puts little weight on my of paranoia. For the adherents to this school, the PPP is a brutally opportunistic party riddled with corrupt officials who were waiting to get their hands on the spoils. They practise the politics of partisanship and domination like other incompetent parties in other third world countries and this behaviour has nothing to do with paranoia. I concede some validity here but I believe this model has to incorporate my framework for a better understanding of the mess the PPP finds itself in at present date.
Even if one accepts this alternative blueprint, it still leaves intact, the passion of the PPP to exclude non-PPP Guyanese from spaces of power. Even if the warships are in the harbour, and are firing away at Freedom House, and a non-PPP person comes up and ask for the key to the armoury because he is the only person who could operate the new weapons, the PPP is going to refuse because they prefer a PPP person to be in charge. It is really sad, and crazy to see how a modern party can be so frenetically excluding in its approach to nation-building. For me, the last straw was the Josh Ramsammy affair at UG. Look what a hero Ramsammy is, and he is not a PNC, not an Indianist, no longer a WPA.
And just want to stabilize the university where he gave thirty years of his life. At his age, what threat he have posed to the PPP? But the PPP 's only reason was that since he was not a PPP, how reliable could he have been.
Is it the end of the PPP? One thing looks like it has ended in Guyana, and that is the Westminister system where one party can win an election and have total and exclusive control over state, society and economy. What replaces this is what we are waiting to see.