We remain politically underdeveloped
“Constitutional reform” and “Electoral reform” have now become fixtures on our political agenda. While there are all sorts of technical definitions, basically, constitutions describe how power in the state is distributed while elections describe how the persons who exercise that power, are chosen. As such, “constitutional” and “electoral” reforms signal that in Guyana, how and by whom power is exercised still are not settled matters, fifty odd years after independence. None of this should surprise locals who have been subjected to a violent dictatorship where elections were rigged for decades. Then, after free and fair elections, witnessed for another decade armed bandits calling themselves “freedom fighters” and waging guerrilla warfare that turned Guyana into a killing field with hundreds of deaths.
While the last decade has ushered in alternating governments indicating that elections now select power holders equitably between the major political parties, the continued call for reforms suggest otherwise. This tells us we are politically underdeveloped and have still not reached that state of the settled democracies where their disagreements are more about policies than procedures. Unlike the game of cricket, where we have accepted the rules and “walk” when the umpire puts his finger up, some political parties even attack the umpire. After the fiasco in the 2020 elections, where there was a blatant attempt to rig the elections, while conceding the need for broad electoral and constitutional reforms, the PPP government announced they are going to start by plugging holes in the laws governing the actual conduct of elections. They proposed draft changes to the Representation of the Peoples Act (RoPA) and requested comments, which they received in face to face interactions and in writing.
The Opposition, while threatening to boycott and demanding some additional changes – such as extending biometrics from voter registration to voter identification – did participate in last week’s “stakeholders” forum. But while one must encourage these attempts to plug gaps in the law, we must accept that when the changes do not go towards improving fairness or justice of the institution, but merely to state simple procedures in excruciatingly detailed fashion, we are spitting in the wind. The premise is that the politicians are always ready to cheat during elections, notwithstanding the fact that RoPA is already two hundred and nine pages long. The drafts presented by the government were a combined thirty-nine pages and included instructions such as, “Ballots cast must be shown to counting agents” and “The number of ballot papers to be issued to presiding officers” be declared. But if, as occurred in 2020, a District Returning Officer, who is required to ascertain the total votes cast in favour of each List of Candidates in their respective Polling Districts by adding up the votes recorded in favour of the respective lists in accordance with the relevant Statements of Poll, which he has to display to designated observers and officials, refused to comply with the last instruction, even after a court order, what does this bode for all the new “tightening”?
Institutions, we are informed, are the
formal and informal rules and norms that organise social, political and economic relations. RoPA states our formal rules that govern our elections and one informal rule is that cheating – which deprives fellow citizens of their fundamental right to choose their government – just isn’t “cricket”. This invokes the crucial difference between “brute facts” and “institutional facts”. The former refers to things like, say, a wall, that can be described by the laws of physics and chemistry. However, “institutional facts” exist only when we all agree on the formal and informal rules that is created by our social practice. A wall becomes a “boundary” – an “institutional fact” only when we agree it is that – there has to be a “collective intentionality” about it to, say, not jump over and pick mangoes.
In Guyana, we still do not have that “collective intentionality” about elections to accept their results to authoritatively choose our political leaders. It started with counting English horses as overseas votes in 1968, using spreadsheets and bedsheets in 2020 to count Statements of Poll (SOP) and who knows what specific stunt will be pulled in 2025. As VS Naipaul observed, we are a “half-formed” society which we refuse to accept can only develop when the rules we have all agreed to are observed by all. So like Sisyphus, we will keep rolling that electoral reform boulder up the hill, only to see it roll downwards.
Sincerely, Ravi Dev