Burnham was man living in the past.
Burnham was an autocrat before the 1980 Constitution. The source of his autocracy was not any latitude which was accorded to him by the Independence Constitution but because of his rigging of elections in 1968, 1973 and 1980.
The civil rebellion of 1976-1979 softened Burnham’s grip on power as much as it softened the Working People’s Alliance which led that rebellion. Burnham was a frightened man during the civil rebellion. His security detail expanded to unprecedented levels. He resorted to political intimidation through violence and victimisation against his political opponents and even against innocent Guyanese. He was allowed to do that because he ruled by fear, supported by the military and police.
Burnham paid a price for his reign of terror. By the time he died in 1985, he was isolated locally, regionally and internationally. He was seen as sweet-talking, honey-tongued, power-drunk dictator.
He not only rigged elections but even the 1978 referendum which was described as the referendum to end all future referenda. The referendum of 1978 was an attempt to postpone the scheduled elections of that year. Burnham did not wish to risk rigging the elections of that year.
As such, he concocted, with the help of Uncle Shahab, a Constitution which he could have manipulated to become President for life and tighten his grip on power. The 1980 Constitution made Burnham Head of State, Head of Government and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, all at the same time.
While when defending the 1980 Constitution, Uncle Shahab took the position that the Westminster-style Constitution was ill-suited to Guyana, he was most defensive in the Constituent Assembly when it came to the question of power-sharing, arguing that the sharing of ministerial responsibility with Minority parties, as proposed by the Trade Union Congress, was at odds with the Westminster principle of collective responsibility which requires all ministers to support government’s decisions.
This reversion to a cardinal element of Westminster could hardly make either Uncle Shahab or Uncle Forbes, candidates for men who were ahead of their time.
Burnham’s peculiar problem was not that he was a man ahead of his time. Rather he was behind the times. It is no wonder that he was seen as the Papa Doc of Guyana.
The 1980 Constitution which Uncle Forbes scripted with the assistance of Uncle Shahab did not totally dispense with the Westminster model. What it did was to superimpose a Presidency onto an otherwise Westminster constitution, clearly betraying that the real intention of the 1980 Constitution was to grant Burnham Presidential powers. This certainly did not require the foresight of men who were before their time.
The 1980 Constitution was a patchwork document. It could hardly have been deemed a socialist Constitution because almost all of socialist clauses are not justiciable. The Constitutional Reform Commission of the post-1997 period could do nothing to remove these clauses since the PNCR’s veneration of Burnham would not allow them to support changes even to the name of the country.
Guyana is still known as the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. But Guyana had long, beginning under the PNCR, rejected Cooperative Socialism. And cooperatives have long gone into remission. But because this was Burnham’s handiwork, the PNCR would never agree to change the name of the country to Guyana.
So absurd is the PNCR adulation of Burnham that they would never want to change the description of Guyana as a nation in transition to socialism.The present PNCR leaders are no socialist and neither is the PPPC. Yet, the Constitution speaks about Guyana being in transition to socialism.
The 1980 Constitution was illegitimate. It was a creature of fraud. The Constituent assembly which was established to draft a new Constitution resulted from a fraudulent referendum and ignored most of the recommendations made to it. Burnham essentially had his way, making it hard to see how such an undemocratic course could be seen as making him a man before his time.
In one of his numerous books, the crafter of the 1980 Constitution, Uncle Shahab, recalled that imperialist Athens used to postulate that justice depends on the quality of power to compel, and the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they must.
That was Burnham… a man who belonged to a bygone age… not a man before his time.
