Accountability is the hallmark of good governance. This is why there are periodic elections every five years or so in which political parties are required to go to the electorate in order to have a new mandate to govern or, if the electorate so decide, to have a new administration in place who in the electorate’s view could do a better job in terms of the delivery of goods and services which were promised by way of election manifestos.

Within recent times, there was quite some debate in the media as to the relevance of the Westminster model of electoral representation based on the principle of majoritarian rule.

It would be recalled that prior to the introduction of proportional representation in the elections of 1964, the electoral system was based on the constituency model whereby the country was divided into a number of constituencies and political parties (or individuals) were required to contest seats on a constituency basis.

The party that won the largest number of constituencies would be declared the winner and would be required to form the government.

Under the constituency model, the PPP won all of the elections from 1953 to 1961, even though in the elections of 1953 the party was removed from office by the British Government mainly out of ideological considerations.

It must be said for the records that the PPP is the only political party in the country and possibly the hemisphere that had never lost a free and fair election, despite attempts by the colonial government to manipulate the constituency boundaries to prevent the PPP from winning a majority of the seats.

This was particularly the case of the elections of 1957 when the country was divided into 14 constituencies. These 14 seats (constituencies) were in fact decided upon before the introduction of universal adult suffrage and in no way reflected an equitable distribution of the voting population.

For example, the whole of Eastern Berbice, with a population at that time of 31, 947 voters were compressed into a single constituency while New Amsterdam with a population of 5,879 was regarded a constituency. The same was true of other constituencies, especially in Georgetown where Burnham was considered to be strong.

The intention clearly was to give the opposition a clear electoral advantage, with Georgetown alone being allocated 3 seats as opposed to the whole of Demerara with a much larger population being allocated a mere two seats.

This manipulation of electoral boundaries in order to achieve a particular electoral outcome is what is referred to as “gerrymandering”.

Despite the gerrymandering process, the PPP (Jagan) won the majority of the constituencies in the elections of 1957.

The PPP (Burnham) won three of the fourteen seats, all in the Georgetown constituencies. The extent of boundary manipulation was evident from the fact that the actual votes received by Dr. Jagan were more than the combined votes of all the five elected members of the opposition!

Readers unfamiliar with our political history may be confused with my reference to two PPPs, namely PPP (Jagan) and PPP (Burnham).

This would require much more space to adequately explain how this came about. In a nutshell, the PPP was split in 1955, just two years after the suspension of the Constitution and the removal of the PPP from the seat of government after a mere 133 days in office.

The PPP had won the elections in 1953 by a landslide victory, winning 18 out of the 24 seats. However, following the suspension of the constitution, the British Government aided and abetted by local reactionary forces, did everything possible to destroy the Party which included putting some of the more militant leaders in prison.

Among those imprisoned were Dr. Jagan and his wife Janet. Burnham, for strategic and tactical reasons, was not harassed, despite the fact that he was Party Chairman. Instead, attempts were made to encourage Burnham to break away from the PPP and form his own Party.

This eventually happened after Burnham sought to take over the leadership of the Party but failed in his bid to do so.

He soon after formed his own Party, which he named PPP (Burnham). The original PPP, formed in 1950, remained under the leadership of Dr. Jagan. Both PPPs went to the elections of 1957 and it was only after the humiliating defeat of Burnham at the elections of 1957 that he changed the name of his party to that of the People’s National Congress (PNC).

This is a bit of digression from the main thesis of this article, but I believe a necessary one if only to enlighten our younger readers who may not be quite familiar with some of the political intrigues that had permeated our politics over the decades.

The question that needed to be asked is: why is it that the PPP, despite all the intrigues and manipulations over the years starting from the time of British colonial rule to that of the PNC, managed to maintain its electoral popularity and improve on its electoral strength until this day?

The answer has more to do with the universalistic values and norms embraced by the Party from the time of its formation and its adherence to the norms of accountability and good governance which is resonating with an increasing universe of Guyanese right across the ethnic and political spectrum of Guyana.