REMARKS by General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Bharrat Jagdeo, at Robert Corbin’s wake deserve to be heard well beyond the mourners.
Unless the PPP and the PNC change, he said, they face extinction. Coming from the General Secretary of the party that has governed for years, that is either a rare moment of honesty or a very shrewd piece of positioning. Either way, the diagnosis is hard to dispute.
The substance of his argument is that the binary thinking born in the 1960s is incompatible with a younger generation that sees politics “in shades of grey.” Those who came of age under Cold War manipulation and engineered racial division carried the hurt of that period for decades.
They lived in ethnic enclaves and passed on stereotypes, and their parties inherited the same suspicions. Mr. Jagdeo is right that the two parties, for all their rhetoric, share working-class roots and a professed commitment to national development. What kept them apart, in his own words, was largely the “old bogey of race.”
Perhaps the most striking part of his tribute was the account of the lost opportunity. Mr. Jagdeo says that, with the backing of the PPP leadership and Janet Jagan still alive, he opened talks with Mr. Corbin at the Office of the President. Two meetings were held. Then came the PNC congress, the accusation that Mr. Corbin had sold out, and the end of the discussions.
That episode is a small but telling lesson in how fear of the stereotype can paralyse leaders who know better. Mr. Corbin, by Mr. Jagdeo’s telling, understood government and understood compromise, and he paid for it within his own ranks.
The 2001 constitutional reforms, which Mr. Jagdeo rightly described as inclusive, were meant to deliver a form of legislative power sharing. By his own admission, friction still dogs their implementation.
Calling on the PNC to adjust its philosophy to “the new Guyana” is fair, but the invitation to change must be backed by action.
The PNC, for its part, cannot hide behind the PPP’s record. Its leadership faces the same generational reality, as voters increasingly decline to inherit loyalties from their grandparents. A party that treats any engagement with its rival as betrayal will find that younger citizens regard its caution as irrelevance.
Mr. Jagdeo is correct that Guyana’s future will involve these parties working together “at some level and some fashion.”
The question is whether they will build that framework deliberately or have it forced on them by an electorate that has moved on. The real honour to Robert Corbin would be for both parties to find the courage that cost him so dearly, and to prove that his willingness to talk was foresight rather than weakness.
