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Guyana must go to the polls before the end of the year, and the politicking has been going on in earnest for some months. The release at the end of June of the IMF’s latest – broadly satisfactory – report on Guyana will have given the ruling People’s Progressive Party-Civic (PPP/C) a boost.
On the face of it, the PPP/C has three disadvantages. It has been in power for 19 years, outgoing President Bharrat Jagdeo is barred from standing again, and the opposition parties have united into A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) behind the presidential candidacy of David Granger of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR). On the other hand, the PPP/C has numbers on its side. It is supported principally by Guyanese of East Indian extraction, who make up 43.5% of the population against Afro-Guayanese 30.2% (16.7% are mixed race, 9.1% Amerindian, and 0.5% Other, according to the 2002 census).
Without actually alluding to the racial factor, Jagdeo made this point about numbers on 8 July in response to the founding to the APNU. He said that in a country such as Guyana with a proportional representation electoral system, election results are all about numbers – and that the component parts of the APNU only mustered something like 36% of the vote in the last election while the PPP/C was close to 55%.
Jagdeo also once again played up concerns about Granger’s past. Previously Jagdeo has accused Granger of being involved in the stealing of ballot boxes during “the era of oppression”. On 8 July, he said: “Granger is running as the presidential candidate [for the APNU] so his record doesn’t disappear because he changes the form of the organization. Granger still has his record to answer for...Lots of bad things happened [when he was in the military].” According to Jagdeo, Granger “wasn’t a regular soldier, he was someone sent from the office of the president to get the army to move in a particular direction and you know what that direction was, to subvert the constitution and the laws...”
The PNCR immediately fired back at the PPP/C and its presidential candidate Donald Ramotar, saying on 9 July: “Donald Ramotar and the PPP/C must give account to the Guyanese people as to why friends of the government seem to have abundant wealth, while citizens’ paycheques finish before the 10th day of the month. They must answer for the steel bars on every window and door and our citizens’ added stress of living in a crime-ridden society.”
The problem with this riposte is twofold. First, the government has accused the PNCR of having “a very close link with criminal gangs” and of ramping up the crime wave in an attempt to undermine the government. Secondly, on the economic front, there is the fact that Guyana registered a fifth consecutive year of robust growth in 2010 (3.4%), as the IMF confirmed in its June report. There were some concerns in the report, for instance about inflation which picked up to 4.4% from 3.7% in 2009; about the external current account deficit (11.4% in 2010 from 8.8% in 2009); and a fiscal deficit of 4.3% of GDP against a budget of 3.2% and a 2009 figure of 3.4%. Nevertheless, the IMF says that growth levels should stay “above the long-run trend of 3%, to around 5% over the medium term” – partly due to the government’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) and private sector investments in gold, oil, and gas sectors. The IMF’s growth projections for 2011 and 2012 are, respectively, 4.8% and 6.0%.
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