DURING the past few weeks, the PPP has been on the offensive against the government. The party’s top flight leaders have been in the news almost every day with an avalanche of attacks on the administration. Gail Teixeira, for example, has announced that the PPP is preparing a dossier of scandals and corruption that have occurred since the government took office last year. As the young people would ask, really?
What a difference 17 months can make in the political life of a nation! When the PPP left office in May 2015, it had gained for itself the reputation as the most corrupt and authoritarian government in the post-independence history of Guyana and the English-speaking Caribbean.
The new APNU+AFC government, on the other hand, was hailed as the embodiment of the much-needed change and hope that a country craves and deserves after more than two decades of political trauma.
Now, less than two years later, if someone who is not familiar with Guyanese politics were to read the newspapers, he or she would get the impression that the designations of the two political entities have been reversed.
It is the government that seems to be on the defensive, while the opposition PPP appears to be the defender of political virtue and national dignity. Serious political observers have begun to ask the inevitable question—how did this happen? How has the PPP, with all its recent political baggage, been able to pull off what is in effect a great scam?
Well, the first major reason for this development lies in the very nature of the PPP, whose leadership has an enormous capacity to convince itself that it is incapable of wrongdoing. This thinking is grounded in a belief in the party’s divine right to govern Guyana and in its chief opponent’s cultural disqualification from holding power. There is an underlying ideology at play here, which was captured by Freddie Kissoon’s contention that the Jagdeo government was practising ideological racism.
Understanding opponents
The PPP, in addition to its capacity to deny its own wrongdoing, has, however, shown a better understanding of its opponents than they have shown of the PPP. The PPP, from the first days of the new government, launched a race-driven, “ethnic cleansing” campaign against the government and has kept it going up to this day. President Jagdeo’s comments in New York a few months ago merely took the rhetoric to another level. This is the very PPP, as Freddie Kissoon reminds us, which sued him for libel for suggesting that their policies were racially driven. What is revealing is that neither the government nor its constituent parties have been able to effectively beat back this PPP campaign.
The PPP took that line of action because it knew that the current leaderships of the parties in the coalition are cowards when it comes to addressing race in the public sphere. The PPP knows the political psyche of the coalition’s leadership. They know that the African-Guyanese middle-class leadership of the coalition would never speak publicly and sensibly about race. For them, race does not exist because in many respects they are not directly affected by it. The PPP also knows that while sections of the African-Guyanese leadership of the PNC are much more literate about race and racism, they have always skirted around the issue in their public discourse. In other words, except for a handful of leaders, they have been opportunistic when it comes to the issue of race—they acknowledge and rail against racism in private, but run for cover when they are publicly confronted with it.
The issue of race
Finally, the PPP is well aware that the Indian-Guyanese leadership of the coalition would never want to appear to be promoting a pro-Black racial narrative. The PPP has been very skilful at projecting PM Nagamootoo and Minister Ramjattan as anti-Indian—a tactic that seems to have played well in the Indian community. The PPP knows that the nimekaran phenomenon is still a strong political card.
So, in effect, the PPP has taken advantage of the government’s clumsiness on the issue of race For example, when Jagdeo launched his broadside in New York by accusing the government of targeting Indian-Guyanese for special discrimination, the government could not bring itself to speak directly to that community and remind it of its uplifting efforts in the sugar and rice sectors and the PPP’s assaults on the Black community when it was in office. The coalition would not win votes if it took that approach, but it would shrink the PPP’s political space. The PPP attacks the government not to win Black votes but as a form of mobilization of its own supporters. But the government has shown little inclination to sensibly counter the PPP politically.
Corruption
Now to corruption. My views on the audits are well known. Never before has the evidence of official corruption been so vivid. What the audits uncovered is what many Guyanese already knew. The PPP was so confident that it could not lose power that it did not hide its transgressions. So when a government has all that evidence and does nothing about it and justifies its inaction by hiding behind legalities, it inevitably loses the high ground and cedes space to the accused. The PPP has been allowed to tout its innocence by the failure of the government to make and prosecute its case. Now the PPP has gone further, it has all but turned the tables on the government—a case of the accused accusing the accuser of the crime.
The PPP knows that this government is not corrupt and does not promote corruption. But the government has made the error of messing with some of the very elements who played games with the PPP. Corruption is ignited not just by government officials, but also by moneyed interests who seek to buy influence from government. The government does not have to necessarily play the game; the mere fact that it is caught kissing these moneyed interests is enough to compromise itself. So the PPP has again exploited the government’s clumsiness to get itself out of jail.
In the final analysis, this government has shot itself in the mouth by unnecessarily relinquishing political space to its opponents. These things do not just happen—such action by governments arise out of its own political dynamics. I am going to say a few things for now. The very make-up of the government is a big contributory factor to its behaviour. Many of the ministers mean well, but this is the most politically inexperienced government in our post-independence history. Most of the ministers never served in government before. That by itself is not a sin—after all the previous government was in office for a whole generation.
But when you add that to the fact that many of them are not steeped in political activism, you get a clearer picture of what I am driving at. Political activism is a great teacher about politics; it brings you into contact with the political motion of the society and helps to develop ideologies that are consistent with that motion.
Inexperience
Most of our ministers entered politics from the top; they have little experience of confronting negative power with their bodies, minds and consciences. It is now commonplace in the Caribbean to have governments which are stacked with managers, but many of them do strive for a balance between managers and leaders who are steeped in activism. The coalition government has erred on the side of managers who are not steeped in activism and nationalist ideologies.
The few ideologically grounded activists in the AFC are outside of government. The many more experienced and ideologically grounded activists in the PNC and APNU are outside of government. It does not seem as if many of them are not even consulted. The APNU leadership does not meet regularly, so there is little opportunity for serious political engagement at that level. In the end we have a government that is trying its best, but it collectively has little sense of its historical significance and responsibility to the historical moment it functions in. And the PPP has mercilessly taken advantage of this weakness. I am ready to say that to my mind, the PPP has outmanoeuvred the government.
What the government has in its favour at the moment is the tremendous political capital that resides in the person of the president. He has to move out of the mode of outing fires in the coalition and give more enlightened leadership and nationalist direction to the government. The other positive thing in the government’s favour is its plurality. But it has to take advantage of the asset by pivoting to a culture of broader intra-coalition consultation.

More of Dr. Hinds ‘writings and commentaries can be found on his YouTube Channel Hinds’ Sight: Dr. David Hinds’ Guyana-Caribbean Politics and on his website www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com. Send comments to dhinds6106@aol.com