Democracy requires political consensus

A democratic polity, in which the law rules supreme, is only possible where there is broad consensus around the conceptual, structural and main processes of the state. Other than that, in one form or another and at different intensities, as Thucydides observed in another context, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Under the PNC and the post Cheddi Jagan PPP/C (the present regime is also not promising) we have had our fill of illiberal government in which law became the servant of those in power and the weak spent their time complaining about dictatorial rule and trying to undermine the state - all to the detriment of the populace, many of whom lost their lives.

Please, give up the usual ethnic blame game and most of all, do not go into the long useless song and dance about the violent nature of Africans and the PNCR, who orchestrated all of this because they wanted to obtain and hold on to power. I am certain that you must have heard of the large number of persons who died in Northern Ireland and other places where a similar ethnic political configuration exists and thousands lost their lives until a sensible political solution was negotiated. It appears to me that the problem is rooted not primarily in the people and their leaders but in the unsuitable assumptions of the political system in which they live. These are alluded to in the following quotation that I will return to in another article.

‘The first assumption is that ‘free and fair elections’ are the most appropriate way both to avoid and to manage acute internal conflict in other (non-Western) countries. The second assumption, which goes hand in hand with the first, is the implicit approval of ‘winner take all’ models of both government and election and disapproval of arrangements that emphasize power sharing and cooperation. The third, again derived from Western experience, is that the types of electoral systems used in the West can be successfully transplanted to the developing world. A final assumption is that stable democracies need to be based on a system of individual rights rather than group rights.’ (Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds ‘Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies,’ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9434/electoralsystems-and-conflict-in-divided-societies).

If you want to make sensible rulings for a state, you must take into consideration the entire system rather than its individual parts, and perhaps also because its members have not been deeply imbued with our various prejudices, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) expressed a superior understanding of the Guyanese reality. Particularly in an ethnically divided society such as Guyana, foundational issues having to do with the quality of the electoral register and the timing of elections require political consensus if a democratic polity is being sought. If the CCJ thought it was prudent to give a date for an election it would have simply added those few words in the square brackets below. ‘The filing of the court proceedings in January challenging the validity of the no confidence vote effectively placed matters on pause, but this Court rendered its decision on 18 June 2019. There is no appeal from that judgment [and therefore elections should be held in Guyana by the 18 September 2019]’.

Sensibly it did not, but chose instead to direct everyone associated with the issue to ‘be faithful to the spirit and letter of the Constitution’ and ‘exercise their responsibilities with integrity.’ The Constitution of which the Court spoke is holistic and it left the parties to take a similarly comprehensive view and find a consensus that will end the current dispute and hopefully lead to the development of a democratic society. Unfortunately the negotiations, such as they are, have been proceeding too disjointedly to deliver much value.

For example, after some time, the parties stopped negotiating through the media and were able to find a chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) acceptable to both sides. But even last Friday, 9th August 2019, Stabroek News carried an article stating, ‘Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday gave notice that if government fails to hold general elections by September 18th, the opposition party would ignore all of its claims to legitimacy after that time’, but we were told the next day in the same newspaper that after a meeting between President Granger and the Leader of the Opposition, the latter “indicated that if there is a ‘positive signal’ that the government intends to move towards a resignation of the Cabinet and the dissolution of Parliament, he would be willing to sit with Granger and discuss a possible extension of their tenure beyond September 18th.”

The politicians and their retinue of attorneys having received the final decision of the CCJ, began to claim victories of various sorts without truly grasping the conceptual underpinning or nature of the Court’s decision and what it required of them. To this day, they are not behaving as if they realise that they were being encouraged to arrive at a consensus by formally negotiating all of their concerns. This approach required them to properly plan the procedural aspects and content of the negotiation process, placing all of the issues including those in the previous paragraph, on an agenda in a manner that will allow them to feed off each other. Instead, they are still throwing isolated issues around in the media while holding fast to a sterile piece of the written onstitution and/or dogmatism and obstinacy instead of creating a comprehensive agenda and selling to the long-suffering public a clear pathway out of the present morass.

Perhaps sensing something of this dilemma Mr. Rashleigh Jackson, in one of his short Stabroek News pieces, suggested that the parties adopt the negotiating strategy known as the ‘single undertaking’. What this means is that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’. Of course, though only one of the architectural concerns of any serious negotiations, it could be a useful approach. ‘Negotiators often think they are being wellorganized when they methodically work through a checklist of key issues one at a time. In fact, by negotiating one issue at a time, they are preventing themselves from capitalizing on their differences with trades across issues. A better approach is to discuss multiple issues simultaneously in negotiation. … Integrative negotiations … allow you (and your counterpart) to get more of what you want by identifying what each party values most.

`Once you have expanded the pie of value, you are in a good position to claim as much of that value as you can for yourself’ (Value Creation in Negotiation. 21/03/2019, Harvard, Programme on Negotiation).

If properly used, the course set by the CCJ could perhaps have fostered value creation over and above the requirement of the current dispute, and led to agreement on the more fundamental issues raised by Reilly et al. Many hoped for this, but the piecemeal public negotiation has already dissipated much of that possibility and the central issue today has to do with house-to-house registration and the timing of elections. Luckily, the answer is simple. Last week I pointed out that the CEO of GECOM stated that he could do ‘an exercise’ to determine if the list is indeed bloated as claimed by the government. The parties should let him do his ‘exercise’ and live with the obvious consequences.