On youth in politics

TWO events in Europe over the past few months have captured the imagination of the world with regard to the potential inherent in the subject of this column, youth in politics.  Recently, the surprise win of the People’s Party in Austria has set its leader, Sebastian Kurz, on track to be – at 31 – the youngest head of government in the world.  In France, earlier this year, 39-year-old Emanuel Macron shocked the world by taking the French presidency with his newly formed En Marche! movement.

A few months back, in conversation with a staunch critic of Guyana’s political establishment, I was told that the problem with our current political system is that it is led by, and I quote, “People who are closer to the grave than they are to reality.”  This was a harsh assessment, but a hard one to effectively argue against on the basis of its first presumption at the very least.  The core of true power in both the government as well as the opposition is a 50-plus society, an interesting phenomenon considering our political history.
The original People’s Progressive Party was founded on January 1, 1950, coming out of existing political movements, the Forbes Burnham-led British Guiana Labour Party (BGLP) and the Cheddi Jagan-led Political Affairs Committee (PAC).  At the time of its formation, Cheddi Jagan would have been just 32, and Forbes Burnham not yet 27.  Janet Jagan, a political force right alongside her husband, would have been 30, playing a role that was not only exceptional not merely because of her youth, but also her ethnicity, nationality and gender – a Jewish American woman in a far-flung colonial outpost. Also notable would be Ashton Chase, one of the founders of the BGLP, who would have been a month shy of 20- years- old when the party was founded in June of 1946.  And of course, Martin Carter, was just 26 when he was first imprisoned in 1953 for spreading dissension against the colonial order, his iconic ‘Poems of Resistance’ being published the next year, after his second imprisonment, events to which we can credit the most powerful lines of Guyanese poetry ever:
“So jail me quickly, clang the illiterate door if freedom writes no happier alphabet.”

In brief, the independence movement in Guyana was not executed by elder statesmen ushering in a new era of change – it was crafted from start to finish by people who were younger than I am when they first decided to take the destiny of an entire country into their own hands and who saw that mission through.
The same can be said for the new wave of political activists in the 1970s, particularly with the rise of the Working People’s Alliance.  When Walter Rodney returned to join and play a leadership role in the newly formed Working People’s Alliance (WPA), he was 32 years old, the same as co-founder Andaiye.  Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine was 34 when he joined the party in 1977.
The last relatively recent political movement led by ‘young’ people was the formation of the Alliance For Change (AFC), eleven years ago, by a 40-year-old Raphael Trotman, defecting from the PNC and a 46-year-old Khemraj Ramjattan defecting from the PPP – the third co-founder, the late Sheila Holder, a former WPA member, was already in her late 50s.
The pattern appears to be that, as our post-independence polity has aged, so has the new political leadership.   With the exception of the recently appointed Chair of the WPA, Tabitha Sarabo-Halley (who I believe is in her late 20s), the average age of the political leadership of the parliamentary parties is around 60, or twice the age of Sarabo-Halley.  Indeed, remove her from the equation and the WPA itself, the second-wave party founded by people in their early 30s, ages considerably.
There seems to be a serious gap between the, let me say, “elder statespersons” in the political establishment and potential young leadership being groomed to meaningfully take over the reins.  In no political party in Guyana – even with Sarabo-Halley accounted for – do I see any policy direction or evolution being shaped or even significantly influenced by young people within the party.  No person under the age of 40 from any political party is out there speaking on national issues in any consistent manner, the probable qualified exception being Charles Ramson, Jr. – our local Shakespearean scholar – and even then only for a relatively brief period of time and with varying competence.

The licence for participating in open political discourse appears to be the exceptional remit of the old, whether government or opposition.  Given the particular nature of the origins of our contemporary political history, this is as unfortunate as it is anomalous.
How did we move from a 37-year-old Forbes Burnham laying down the ideological infrastructure of the fledgling PNC in 1957, to the relative silence of the very bright Ryan Belgrave, Chair of the Guyana Youth and Student Movement (GYSM) 60 years after?  I serve on the Board of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited with Sarabo-Halley, and know she has extremely strong and well-informed opinions, but I don’t see any mechanism where her views as Chair of the WPA make it into the public domain.  Cynthia Rutherford, current President of Youth For Change, the AFC’s youth arm, is also bright and opinionated but, again, no consistent voice in the public domain.   This year, September, apparently marked the 65th anniversary of the Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO), the youth arm of the PPP.  No one knows who the current leader is and what is his or her vision for the party.  The group’s active Facebook page predictably features one person, the current object of worship of the PPP’s new cult of personality, Bharrat Jagdeo.  What happened?  How did we get to this place?
My guess is that the reasons are complex in themselves and taken altogether.  Certainly I see a nexus between political power and the control of resources playing a part. In brief, political succession in a land of scarce resources can arguably suffer from the same core problem from which a land with a surfeit of resources suffers – that is, a monopoly on power, both as a pathway to material gain and for the privileges in themselves that power provides.
In Guyana, we’ve had a curious distinction of being both a land of scarcity and a land of plenty.  In time of scarcity, personal survival is often linked directly to political viability, whether via the basic membership of a political party to an occupation of the upper tiers of the hierarchy of what functionally becomes a political pyramid scheme – the lower members exist to give validation and succour to those at the top, a system which disincentivises succession planning or praxis.
And in times of potential plenty on the horizon, the incentives to make way for a new generation of leadership to reap the rewards that were absent in times of scarcity are even less.

I believe related to this is the apparent absence of inclusion of youth in party mechanisms beyond the incidental, peripheral or token.  That is an ironic reality of youth-based political initiatives everywhere.  Very often the young people who overthrow an oppressive, regressive or even simply static system become the old people who engineer its mirror replacement.  We seemed to have missed that sweet spot of political machinery engineering in which both necessary stability as managed by the experienced and the capacity for evolution as can only be initiated and executed by the young, co-exist in complement.

And finally, there doesn’t seem to be any grand unifying project to galvanise young people, even in competition with each other.  We’ve had independence, and from then on what we’ve had is a crudely divided society in which ethnic considerations dominated the political space leaving little room for real ideological differences, any sort of dialectic of views that could have evolved an animated young people in any meaningful way.  Combine those factors, and I believe you have the relative apathy and political risk aversion that restricts our youth.

That said, it doesn’t matter the political persuasion, I refuse to believe that within the current political system young people are comfortable with their current place in the machinery of their respective parties.  We live in an age when the young are more in tune with the infrastructure to access and benefit from the world’s currently most valuable resource, information.  As in the post-World War II era out of which our Independence movement was born, the paradigm in which the young people of today operate is exponentially different from that of their parents.

A Kurz or a Macron is not handed a baton of leadership – they either assert themselves as a revolutionary force within an existing machinery or leave to form a new one.  Indeed, the political evolution that led to the coalition victory of 2015 was precipitated by the formation of the AFC by the then relatively young defectors Trotman and Ramjattan a decade before.  That said, defection cannot be the default catalyst for sustainable innovation in our polity – a political disruption is only as useful as the functional stability it ushers in.  Young people within the existing parties need to assert their voices more within the existing systems, seek greater influence on public policy, and reach out their hand right now to accept the mantle of leadership, not sit around hoping that some day it is going to fall into their laps if they stick around long enough.  By the time that happens, a new generation of future leaders would most likely have come and gone.

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