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-long campaign for August poll
FOR THE first time in Guyana’s 4I-year history as a constitutional republic, three first-time presidential hopefuls will be competing to lead their respective parties to form a new government at the coming parliamentary and presidential elections, carded for August this year.
The trio of first-timers include a veteran 6I-year-old politician of the incumbent People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Donald Ramotar, who was last Monday unanimously chosen to be the party’s chief flag-bearer for a marathon election campaign that’s expected to officially get underway later this month.
The PPP’s candidate, an economist and long-serving General Secretary of the party — whose founder-leader was the late Dr Cheddi Jagan — emerged as a consensus presidential choice after three other nominees surprisingly withdrew from the contest.
They were: Ralph Ramkarran, Speaker of the House since I992; Clement Rohee, Minister of Home Affairs; and Gail Teixeira, former cabinet minister and currently special political adviser to retiring President Bharrat Jagdeo.
Ramotar would be competing against the presidential hopeful of the main opposition People’s National Congress (PNC), David Granger, a 65-year-old former Brigadier of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) who is being presented as a historian and ‘security expert’.
Both would have to contend with the third newcomer — a 50-year-old lawyer, Khemraj Ramjattan, as presidential candidate of the Alliance for Change (AFC), which markets itself as ‘the alternative’ to both the PPP and PNC.
The PPP, which returned to State power in I992 when electoral democracy was finally restored in Guyana after 24 years of recurring rigged elections, will be involved in a very challenging bid to retain State power for a consecutive fifth five-year term.
This weekend, it will be engaged in conference strategies in Guyana’s three counties — Demerara (seat of the capital, Georgetown), Berbice, and Essequibo.
The conferences were organised to secure endorsement from Party constituencies of Ramotar as presidential candidate. Necessary as this may be, it is an exercise generally viewed to be of academic interest.
The tradition
Once the pivotal Central Committee makes such a decision, there is no record of it having ever been reversed. It is a tradition consistent with the PPP’s consensual approach on who gets the honour to lead the party into a general election campaign. While the party’s patriarch (Cheddi Jagan) and matriarch (Janet Jagan) lived, they were the obvious choices.
This tradition is also part of the history of the PNC, while its founder-leader, Forbes Burnham, lived, and was extended to successor, Desmond Hoyte while he served as President for a seven-year period.
However, the unanimous choice of Ramotar as presidential candidate was in sharp contrast to the tension-filled campaigning and open disagreements that had characterised the PNC’s efforts to elect its presidential candidate.
That presidential campaign strategy, nevertheless, also served to highlight a new dimension in internal democracy for the PNC which, over a period of some 42 years — 1968 to 2010 — had acquired the dubious reputation of mastering the art of rigging national as well as internal party elections.
Its current leader, Robert Corbin, a lawyer, who had twice unsuccessfully led the party into national elections before deciding to stand aside in favour of mobilising support for Granger, still bears the burden of having been controversially elected against his challengers.
The third-party alternative, AFC, which is relatively new to electoral politics (about seven years compared with the PPP and PNC, the two thoroughbreds in Guyanese politics), is now in the same position of the PNC in having a presidential candidate who is not also the leader of the party.
The AFC leader, Raphael Trotman, also a lawyer, who had defected as a parliamentarian from the PNC, had unsuccessfully led the party into the 2006 general election as its presidential candidate. Now Ramjattan, who is a parliamentary defector from the PPP, has been given the opportunity to be AFC’s presidential hopeful.
Going of Jagdeo
The outgoing President Jagdeo, who has been Head of State for some 13 years (including part of the term he served when President Janet Jagan resigned through ill health), is constitutionally debarred from serving more than two consecutive five-year terms.
He is known to have been a most influential behind-the-scenes supporter of Ramotar as the PPP’s presidential candidate, and is also credited by the international financial institutions and major foreign donor governments for the leadership provided for Guyana’s significant social and economic achievements as President.
At the 2006 elections, the first-time contestant, AFC, won five of the 65 parliamentary seats with eight per cent of the valid votes, compared with the incumbent PPPC’s 36 seats and approximately 55 per cent votes; and the PNCR’s 22 seats based on 34 per cent votes.
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), on which both the PPPC and PNCR are represented under an independent chairman, has given the assurance that all arrangements would be firmly in place for the expected August poll.
The PNC’s Granger has already gone public with a call for a “clean election campaign” when he sent a letter of congratulation to the PPP’s candidate, Ramotar.
If by ‘clean’ is meant steering away from the sickening divisive social and political issues that have so often dominated electioneering politics in Guyana, it could well contribute to a new and welcome atmosphere for the future of Guyana, which remains a most vital partner for the future progress of CARICOM as well.
