‘Lowe misinterpreted what I said’
Dear Editor, Confronted with the fact that the PPP/C government was underperforming, largely because of the activities of the opposition and that given the structure of ethnicity in our country, there needed to be an enhanced level of cooperation with the PNC, Ms Janet Jagan never tired of claiming that the PPP/C was doing its best in the circumstances and that the PNC was just power hungry and could not be trusted, and that cooperation would occur when trust was built between the PPP and PNC!
There is a lot that is questionable about Ms Jagan’s position (SN May 2, 2012) but it immediately came to mind as I read Mr Sherwood Lowe’s ‘We can improve people’s well-being with improvements to our governance even without a power-sharing constitution’ (SN June 4, 2017). How could it be that an individual who, in my assessment is far more libertarian in his views, has a similar ‒ and perhaps a more questionable ‒ position on the issue of radical political cooperation than Ms Janet Jagan, who has been its implacable foe?
Confronted by the fact that ‘bringing an ethnically divided society together’, which is critical to our development, will not be facilitated in any substantial way by the Draft Strategic Plan for Enhancing Social Cohesion in Guyana 20172021, Mr Lowe says the following: “In light of the PPP’s continued and instinctive rejection of shared governance, Dr Jeffrey’s approach would see us hanging up our social cohesion and good governance gloves probably forever. But … we can make meaningful improvements while we wait on the political ideal for Guyana in the form of a power-sharing constitution” (SN, June 4).
Rather than lambasting the APNU+AFC government for its lacklustre approach to constitutional reform and the creation of the national unity government it promised, Mr Lowe blames the PPP and, à la Janet Jagan, claims that we can improve the life of our people until “the political ideal is reached” and the “instinctively” objectionist PPP is prepared to come to the table. I hope for the sake of Guyana that Mr Lowe has a very liberal understanding of ‘instinctive’.
In this final response to Mr Lowe, I believe it was only by misinterpreting what I said that he could possibly have thought that I hold that incremental improvements are impossible to a point where he could have thought it necessary to make such an understanding the focus of his missive. He claimed that my approach to social cohesion is that: “(i) social cohesion either can exist (with constitutional reform) or cannot (under the present political arrangements) … (ii) all social cohesion is about race relations. … (iii) [I have ignored] the other aspects of social cohesion … (iv) [I] reject good governance as a necessary, if insufficient, condition.”
For the life of me, I cannot understand how he could have arrived at those conclusions based, for example, on my statement that: “However defined, a difficulty with the concept is its omnibus nature, namely that fault lines across social class, religion, race, ethnicity, urban and rural disparities, etc, can all weaken social cohesion. Unless one is very careful, the concept’s scope and vagueness limit its capacity to facilitate a focus on the fundamental problem that gave rise to the Plan ‒ race and ethnicity in a divided Guyana. In my view, this latitude is precisely what ‒ deliberately or otherwise ‒ contributes to the (Strategic Plan) being able to camouflage the fact that it has largely missed its essential mark.
“Mr Lowe’s resort to incrementalism is precisely the kind of approach that theorists have claimed allow notions of social cohesion, such as that contained in our Strategic Plan, to ‘mask’ and largely miss the fundamental point of its existence, namely dealing with the issue of race and ethnicity in our society.” Yours faithfully, Henry B Jeffrey