Coalitions in Guyana

Opening a spanking new headquarters for the Alliance for Change (AFC) last weekend, President David Granger pronounced that “coalition politics is here to stay”. From the context of his remarks, while he not surprisingly referred to the coalition between his A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) and the AFC, it would appear that he was also alluding to coalition politics in Guyana in general.

In a polity that has been dominated by ethnic voting since before independence, the President might have been taking into cognisance recent demographic trends, which makes it clear there is no one ethnic group commanding a majority in the country any longer. Assuming then that the orientation to voting remains the same, the parties anchored in ethnic segments would be forced by the logic of majoritarian politics to form coalitions to form the government.

But the elections of 2011 and 2015 demonstrated that the issue might not be as clear-cut as that scenario and with our constitution declaring that the party with a plurality captures the Executive, it is quite possible that the outcome of 2011 might repeat itself: one party with the largest number of votes capturing the Executive and the other party/parties controlling the Legislature. While this proved to be a very unstable arrangement, barring an amendment to the constitution, lightning might very well strike again.

But within a polity with several groups needing to agglomerate together to secure even a plurality, this opens up another scenario: the possibility of political mobilisation becoming more fluid and our country breaking out at last from conducting elections that are mirror images of ethnic censuses. With no one group forming a majority, the major impediment that prevented cross ethnic voting through the years – being branded as “traitors” for “splitting” the vote – becomes irrelevant. Whether at the individual or group level, the imperative is to reach across the divide. Politics might then also become more moderate as platforms are adjusted for a wider appeal.

Within this wider lens, then, it might be useful to examine the specific APNU/AFC coalition that the President was ostensibly referring to. The question is whether its longevity is as extensive as the President might hope. And “hope” it has to be. It is widely conceded that it was the vote the AFC brought over from what used to be the PPP’s solid Berbice constituency that took the PNC-led APNU over the top by a mere 5000 votes. For APNU to have any chance of holding off the PPP’s charge in 2020, it would be critical for the AFC not only to remain in harness but to actually expand its reach.

However, the refusal of APNU since obtaining office in implementing the Cummingsburg Accord that was supposed to enumerate the specific conditions which had to be satisfied to consummate the coalition has to have cast a pall of the AFC’s leaders, even though they have to show a united front. At the opening of the AFC’s headquarters, as reported officially by GINA, “Co-Founder of the AFC and Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan reminisced about the signing of the Cummingsburg Accord at the house of President Granger, who was Opposition Leader at the time, and said that in time all the promises in the Coalition’s Manifesto will be delivered. ‘We have made mistakes that we must be held accountable for it…’ said Ramjattan”.

Ramjattan was circumspect not to elaborate on the “mistakes” in not implementing the Accord but was sending a clear signal that he expected them to be “delivered”. Some of the “undelivered” would be for President Granger to “delegate”, as he had promised, chairing of the Cabinet to Prime Minister Nagamootoo, as well as to assign him some clear “line responsibilities”.

Otherwise, the AFC stands in danger of fulfilling Ramjattan’s prediction that the AFC would become “dead meat” if it coalesced with APNU. And then so also would APNU.