The immediate task of small parties
In a letter last Saturday, Dr. Vishnu Bisram argued more or less successfully for the formation of alliances by small political parties and for the Guyana Elections Commission to give them as much space as possible to achieve this goal (SN:18/01/2020).
However, when it came to his reasons for wanting these parties to succeed, he went badly wrong and thus forced me to divert somewhat from the task I had set myself last week. At this election time, when the need for constitutional reform has gained enormous traction, I will venture to say that although Dr. Bisram’s position falls well within the conventional wisdom, its acceptance would solve none of Guyana’s pressing ethnic problems and would lead to another lost opportunity such as occurred during the 2001 constitutional reform process.
Dr. Bisram wrote, ‘The general feeling is if the minor parties can win seats in parliament, they can deny the victor a majority. In so doing, the minor parties can call the shots on governance – helping to provide responsible, non-racist, and corrupt free governance. They will hold the balance in parliament and influence legislation, budgets, expenditure, policymaking and more importantly how the oil revenues would be spent. It is, therefore, in the interest of the minor parties to win seats.’
On the face of it, this appears a quite reasonable proposal until we recognise that to arrive at the above conclusion, Dr. Bisram, who appeared to understand quite well that Guyana suffers from deep age-old ethnic cleavages, has adopted a Westminster-type outlook that allows him to speak of ethnic political parties as if they are neutral entities such as would exist in a more or less homogeneous political state. He does not properly take into consideration that the PPP/C and the APNU+AFC are ethnic political contraptions that receive the vast majority of their votes from those of Indian and African ethnicities and that no side wants to be ruled by the other. Making a proposal that will allow Africans to rule over Indians for even a short period will be unacceptable to the Indians and vice versa, but his proposal opens the door for their possibly doing so for decades: maybe even forty years!
To demonstrate this inadequacy in Dr. Bisram’s thought, let me attempt to operationalise his proposal. The elections are held and no party gains over 50% of the votes or seats in parliament but the PPP/C wins the plurality, APNU+AFC is the first runner up and the Liberty and Justice party (LJP) comes in third with 3 seats - just sufficient to hold the two parties below 50% - and holds the parliamentary balance. Under our constitution, the party that wins the plurality has the right to form the government - as occurred in 2011. Even if it does not control parliament it needs only to gain sufficient parliamentary support from one or the other of the two parties to pass the 50% mark and effectively to govern - to pass most laws, the budget etc. Thus, claiming that it is providing ‘responsible, non-racist, and corrupt free governance’, the Bisram proposal allows the LJP, with its small support base to keep the PPP/C in government for any length of time once the PPP/C can win the plurality and the LJP can hold the parliamentary balance.
When you consider that given the demographic shift, the PPP no longer has an overall majority but is still capable of winning the plurality, and given its ambition to stay in government for over a generation, which group of politicians would not nurture and sustain this relationship with the LJP? The Africans – or Indians – and their leadership are unlikely to accept being locked out of government and being ruled by the other ethnic side in this manner, and therefore the Bisram proposal should be discarded as it is a recipe for increased ethnic alienation, political instability and suboptimal development.
So why does Dr. Bisram make such a porous suggestion? His possible search for ethnic advantage aside, the kind of approach he is suggesting - having the smaller parties holding whichever government accountable - if not the actual result of that approach, is dominant in the governance discourse in Guyana. It was at the root of the formation of the AFC and was incorrect then for the very reason Dr. Bisram’s current approach is incorrect. Having recognised the deep ethnic cleavages in Guyana, the AFC was proposed as a political party that over time would have been able to garner a few seats to hold whatever party is in government accountable until such time as it is able to win government on its own.
Although this way of considering the matter also understood the deep political cleavages that infest Guyanese society, when it came to political parties, as in the case of Dr. Bisram, in a Westminster-type fashion, it viewed them as neutral operators picking up votes from here and there and not caring who rules once that rule is accomplished by a ‘majoritarian democratic’ process. Unfortunately, to ethnic political parties and their followers who rules is perhaps much more important than how they come to rule. With all the best intentions in the world, the use of a small parliamentary presence to keep any of the larger parties in government, much as the AFC does today, would be painted by the ethnic entrepreneurs on the other side as unacceptable and will be unable to contribute anything to reducing ethnic alienation and dissension. Indeed, depending upon the final governmental configuration, such an effort by the small parties will most likely again lead to demand for shared governance and the disruptive activities associated with making this demand a reality and prevent its realisation.
Thus we need to abandon a fundamental assumption of western, particularly Westminster-type, political culture that supports majoritarian models of both government and elections and largely disapproves of arrangements that emphasise power sharing and cooperation (Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds ‘Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies,’https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9434/electoralsystems-and-conflict-in-divided-societies). As such, at this stage of Guyana’s political development, the only sensible purpose for a small party that holds the balance in parliament is to attempt to do what the two larger parties have promised but have failed to deliver. As a precondition for any support to the party that wins the plurality, the immediate task of the smaller party must be to demand immediate constitutional reform to introduce an appropriate form of shared governance that will be inclusive of all the major ethnic and other groups, e.g., women and youths. If the party winning the plurality refuses to cooperate, it will in any case be forced to work (informally and thus less desirably) with the parliamentary leadership of the other large ethnic group or must be prepared to go back to the electorate, where I believe it would lose the sympathy of many voters.
Neither ethnic self-interest nor our allegiance to archaic political thought should again be allowed to stymie Guyana’s progress. Any attempt by small balancing parties to shore up a government of one or other of the larger ethnic parties under the guise of ushering in good governance and helping to end corruption, ethnic alienation and facilitating growth and development is doomed to failure.