Dear Editor
It’s now almost two months since the March 2, 2019 elections and Guyanese still do not know who won the contest. Even in countries with large populations, it does not take that long to determine the results of an election. What does it say to us that we still do not have a result after two months?
For one-half of the electorate, it says that they have won, and the other side is stealing their victory via an elaborate rigging scheme at GECOM.
The other half is saying they have already been lawfully declared the winner, but the formal declaration is being blocked by the losers who are using every trick in the book to carry out their scheme. In both instances, the two sides see what they look for.
Both sides have enlisted recommendations from so-called independents and neutral observers. Since one side has been more successful in getting far more big names and powerful interests to bolster its case, it appears to the naked eye that their case has more merit than the other.
They have also been able to locate their case in the context of a historical fear that at least one-half of the population responds to with deep emotions—rigged elections.
What do I see in the long delay in arriving at a result? At best, I see a disputed election, that would not be solved at the ballot box.
I say so because it does not take two months and more to solve a ballot-box problem. It says, then, to me that “there is more in the mortar than the pestle.”
There is more than meets the naked political eye. There is a subtext that we are missing or avoiding—silencing. In playing up the “democratic” manifestation of the problem, we are in effect silencing the real political, historical, and sociological problem.
Here is what I think is the problem. Guyana like most recent post-colonial societies is government centered. The government is by far the most powerful institution in the society. There is no independent and effective civil society space or private sector or military to compete with the civilian government.
The government in Guyana has complete formal control of state institutions.
It distributes resources political, economic, and cultural. It has monopoly of coercion. It is all-powerful.
If you win an election in Guyana, you win total formal power and if you lose, you lose all formal power. It makes sense that in a bifurcated society like ours where ultimately, we vote ethnically with minor adjustments from time to time, there will be a big fight over who wins the government—who governs?
And this is what we have been fighting over since March 2. Winning the government is not only a guarantee of power for your side, but a defence against the tyranny of the other side.
This is what the majoritarian, winner-take-all system has saddled us with since 1955. Winner takes-all in an ethnically divided society is problematic—it leads to trouble.
In Guyana, we have had bitter experiences in that regard these last six to seven decades. The problem led to a civil war 1961-64. It led one side to suspend formal democracy for 28 years with far-reaching consequences.
It led the other side to institute ethnic-domination and rule by political gangs as substitutes for state institutions with equally far-reaching consequences.
The promise of Coalition government between 2011 and 2020 was squandered first by the Ramotar government and later the Granger government.
Neither government had the courage and foresight to move beyond the confines of the winner-take-all, majoritarian, ethnic domination framework and culture.
So, we arrive at 2020 as an exposed and compromised nation—highly infected with ethnic supremacism.
We went through the motions of an election—dancing and waving our flags, taunting one another, and fooling ourselves that we were honoring some democratic promise. As it turns out, we were laying the groundwork for the political impasse, which has dragged on for two months. Like Samuel Beckett portrayed in his famous play “Waiting for Godot,” we keep waiting for the ballot boxes to rescue us. In the interim like Beckett’s two principal characters, we encounter and discover things—terrible things, in our case.
I am firm in this conviction—those ballot boxes will not deliver us from our ethno-political vice. They will not rescue us. A few weeks ago, I suggested the scrapping of the elections and the installation of an interim Government of national unity.
I was politically lynched by one side, which saw my suggestion as undemocratic and a cover for the other side.
So, I keep my proposal on the table. Let it stay there in all its craziness. And let there be the recount; let it go forth. It is going forth and its now dawning on them that there is no magic in a recount in a situation that is more than what is in the boxes. The recount is not likely to lead to a gift for nether side.
For what it’s worth, I am calling on the dogs on both sides to tell your masters to start talking about a post-recount solution.
For, when a winner is declared, a new chapter will begin.
Prime Minister Keith Rowley says it will not be nice. I say it would be ugly. On a Globespan24-7 programme this past week, both Ravi Dev and I said we must be prepared to live with the consequences. Commonsense could soften the landing.
David Hinds
