I WATCHED with horrific incredulity as Vincent Alexander told his podcast host that people have referred to Burnham as a dictator and that cannot be accurate. He said dictatorship denotes that the leader does not listen to people and take their views into consideration and imposes his views on others. He added that there is no other leader in Guyana that can match Burnham’s interactions with people.
I am one year older than Alexander and I have lived in Guyana when Burnham ruled, and the Burnham I knew and how he governed Guyana bears no resemblance to the consultation portrait that Alexander painted. Before I criticise Burnham’s fictional consultation habit, it would be useful to recall the notorious consultation scandal involving Prime Minister Burnham.
Under the 1966 constitution, the Finance Minister had the exclusive right to refuse economic policy decisions of the Prime Minister. The policy could only be implemented if the Finance Minister was consulted. The Finance Minister at the time was Peter D’Aguiar of the coalition party, the United Force.
Prime Minister Burnham called D’Aguiar over the phone about a financial matter. D’Aguiar rejected the decision. Burnham said okay; he was still going ahead because of the fact that he called him, he met the requirement of consulting him.
Let’s give a second example of how dictatorial Burnham was and how accepting other people’s input was Burnham’s main vexation. As the flour ban created a lopsided society with police, army, and public servants being corrupted, the PNC called a special meeting to analyse the effectiveness of the flour ban.
One complaint from PNC leaders was that the flour was coming from Suriname, with the main importers being based on the border village of Skeldon, and thus Skeldon was producing millionaires at a rapid rate. The confabulation went on for hours. Speaker after speaker called for the abolition of the ban. All the circumstances played to Burnham’s narcissist temperament. He loved the ambience because it made him the god at the meeting. When all the viewpoints were completed, Burnham nonchalantly told the gathering, “I am keeping the ban.”
I don’t know which country Alexander was living in, but it was not Guyana under the leadership of Forbes Burnham. What Alexander, when he joined the PNC in the seventies, saw was Burnham indeed seeking out people and interacting with them. The problem with Alexander was that he was too intellectually underdeveloped at the time to see the sophisticated con game of Burnham.
Burnham talked to people, asked them what they wanted, and it began and ended there. Burnham used to laugh at people after he consulted them. Alexander, as a PNC youth leader, actually burned the Burnham consulting party leaders and the Guyanese people, but what Alexander never saw was Burnham laughing after the interaction was over.
There was an inherent contradiction between Burnham’s personality and Burnham’s consultation habit. The two could not co-exist. This was the congenital weakness in Burnham’s rule. Burnham believed that he was an extraordinarily special person and therefore the inputs from others were inferior to his thinking.
Burnham was particularly averse to being told that he got it wrong. Since Alexander is permanently in love with Burnham, he needs to read a new publication on Guyana, titled “A Proxy Africa: Guyana, African Americans and the Radical 1970s.” That book documents the inherent flaws of Burnham, which led to the eventual untergang of Burnham.
As the chasm widened between Eusi Kwayana’s Black American wife, whom the Black American refugees in Guyana admired and Burnham, the exiles advised Burnham to make peace with the woman and her husband. Ann Cook (Tchaiko Kwayana) was instrumental in bringing the exiles to Guyana, and they saw her as a woman of deep political integrity.
Burnham refused to listen. When the exiles advised him on being careful with his attitude to Walter Rodney, they were rebuffed too. Guyana’s history would have turned out differently if, on these two issues, Burnham was willing to listen. Burnham’s eventual downfall came about over those two very issues.
As the split between the Kwayanas and Burnham widened and as Rodney’s popularity grew, the narcissist instincts took hold on Burnham. He felt it was infra dig to listen to the Black American exiles whom he had patronised; thus, they should know their place.
If Burnham used to listen and accept what came out of his consultations with people, his rule would not have disintegrated so rapidly in the seventies. Burnham singlehandedly imposed compulsory National Service (NS) on UG students without even an ounce of consultation. Janet Jagan asked Burnham for a compromise on NS- exempt the female UG students. Burnham laughed at her. Forbes Burnham was a demonic dictator that listened to no one, not even God.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.