Caribbean & Central America - August 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Race is never far from the surface of Guyanese politics, as an incendiary speech in New York by former president Bharrat Jagdeo has once again demonstrated. Jagdeo, who headed up a People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government from 1999 to 2011, is a representative of Guyana’s East Indian community.

Speaking on 24 July at the Albion Reunion celebration, an annual event held by New York-based Guyanese of Indian descent, Jagdeo warned: “There is an assault on our democracy. There is an assault on people of Indian origin. There is an assault on supporters of the PPP.” He said that the coalition government led by President David Granger (leader of A Partnership for National Unity – APNU) was “snatching people’s land”, and that the situation was “even worse in some regards” than during the long political domination of Forbes Burnham and the People’s National Congress (PNC). Burnham first won power in 1964, two years before Guyana’s independence. He held the post of prime minister until 1980 and that of an upgraded executive presidency from 1980 until his death in 1985.

The mostly Afro-Guyanese supported PNC held onto power for a further seven years after Forbes Burnham’s death, and it was not finally ousted by the PPP until 1992, after 28 years in power. The PPP then had its own lengthy period of dominance, only finally relinquishing power in 2015 to the APNU (of which the PNC is the main component) and its junior partner the Alliance for Change (AFC).

This potted electoral history of Guyana demonstrates nothing if not the power of incumbency, which no doubt accounts in part for Jagdeo’s bitterness at the PPP’s return to the wilderness. The fear is that the PPP could be faced with an extended exile from power, and that fear can only have been increased by the latest census results.

The full details of the 2012 census were released in early July, and while the report did not make particularly comforting reading for either main party, it was worse for the Indian-supported PPP. According to the figures, the population of East Indian descent declined from 326,277 in 2002 to 297,493 in 2012, that is from 43.4% of the total population to 39.8%. Over the same period, the Afro-Guyanese population declined from 227,062 (30.2% of the total) to 218,483 (29.2%).

Where the PNC/APNU was able to draw more comfort than the PPP was in the increase in the mostly APNU-supporting mixed-race population from 125,727 (16.7%) to 148,532 (19.9%). This means that the combined share of the Afro-Guyanese and mixed-race population has increased from 46.9% to 49.1%. Then there are the Amerindians, who make up an interesting segment of the population with their ‘floating’ political allegiances. Between 2002 and 2013, the Amerindian population increased from 66,675 (9.1% of the total) to 78,492 (10.5%).

As one PPP-supporting observer noted after the publication of the census figures, APNU has the advantage of “an increasing mixed population and the perquisites of government to entice Amerindian support away from the PPP”. APNU is also favoured by the fact that the Indian population is declining more swiftly than the African, which is a trend that is likely to increase (through emigration) the longer the PPP is excluded from power.

The Albion Reunion, to whose supporters Jagdeo addressed his inflammatory remarks in New York, alludes to this latter point on its website, where it asks: “Why [have] Guyanese emigrated in large numbers from Guyana to the US and other countries?” The answer, it says, is “simple but disturbing”. It is that the mass exodus of Guyanese from Guyana started in the mid-seventies “during the brutal and repressive reign of the People’s National Congress, under the leadership of Mr Forbes Burnham, who lost his objectivity, exercised racial bigotry, banned staple foods, and executed a choke-hold on the Guyanese populace”. And, says the Albion Reunion, it victimised its “mostly Indo-Guyanese” detractors.

There is some truth in this, but it is nevertheless flawed as a catch-all explanation for the decline in Guyana’s Indian population. After all, the PNC cannot be blamed for the 5% decline between 1991 and 2002 and the further 4% decline between 2002 and 2012 – these declines were almost entirely on the PPP’s watch.

The government’s response to Jagdeo’s speech was to issue a formal statement accusing him of descending into a “racial cesspit” and “insulting the intelligence of Indo-Guyanese and all Guyanese who have repudiated him for the perverse corruption under this regime”.

The statement added: “The Coalition Government remains committed to stabilising the Guyanese economy after years of lawlessness, nepotism, corruption, cronyism, mismanagement, misrule, and the flagrant misuse of resources.”

The reference to resources is apposite as the economic stakes in Guyanese politics have just been raised to an altogether higher level. As we discussed in last month’s issue [RC-16-07], a second major oil discovery by Exxon-Mobil, which could add as many as 1.4bn barrels to the 700m barrel reservoir discovered in May 2015, has been described by Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman as “explosively transformative for the economic and social development of all Guyanese”.

The PPP’s fear, of course, is that if it does not get back to power in the next election, then it will not be “all Guyanese” who will benefit; it will be the mainly Afro-Guyanese and mixed-race supporters of the APNU government – and the Amerindian population, who could indeed be enticed away from the PPP by “the perquisites of government”.

The government has tried to reassure the international community that it is determined to play fair with its windfall. It has said that it intends to subscribe to the standards espoused by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI); and at an EITI conference on 29 June, the natural resources minister told participants that the government was convinced that “transparency, accountability, and good governance are the bedrock of strong economies and strong societies”.

But the outgoing deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Georgetown, Bryan Hunt, made the point a few days later that no country that has not previously been an oil producer “is ever well-prepared for a discovery of that magnitude”. He did add that he thought that Guyana “can be ready by the time the oil is ready to come out of the ocean floor”, but it is unlikely that the PPP is going to be much comforted by that thought. Even with the best intentions on corruption and transparency, it is the incumbent that is going to reap the electoral rewards.