Reasoning away structures
experiences spanning over a century point to the fact that some social structures can be quite enduring and that ethnically fractured countries such as ours contain a tenacious structural condition in that they do not have a ‘we the people’ could Mr. Lewis seriously be asking us to give this condition ‘a chance to work.’ In the absence of a united public political opinion, how does he intend to hold government accountable? Are we to understand that, like Robert Owen, he believes that it is possible to eliminate this structural deformity by simply reasoning with our ethnic groups and/or their elites not to vote race; not to be ethnic parties; to consider the national interest and not what they perceive to be their own? Coming as he does in the in the 21st century, if he holds that more exhortation and time will extricate us from our current difficulties, he is even more utopian than the early socialists!
Unless Mr. Lewis can provide a better answer to this structural deformity, conventional wisdom has it that as in the conflict between capital and labour, this condition will not just evaporate with time but has to be managed by way of sharing government, establishing some form of ethnic democracy or succumbing to dictatorship. I take it that only the first of these are reasonably acceptable and if there is one thing that the reading public knows about Dr. Hinds it is that over the years he has been one of the staunchest supporters of executive shared governance. Not surprising, then, in the very report to which Mr. Lewis refers Dr. Hinds stated: ‘We (WPA) feel that Constitutional Reform is critical to everything that we are doing because constitutional reform has to do with the way the state for example is reconstructed…with the allocation of power…with the whole question of ethnicity and the sharing of power in this country.”
If our intention truly is, as Mr. Lincoln Lewis wishes, to hold the government accountable and quickly provide the good life for our people, establishing a properly structured governance arrangement is the most important political issue today. Usually, as was the case with our constitutional reform process at the end of the last century, the elites in control of the government have to be forced to make these kinds of radical changes. The opportunity to be transformative was missed during the last reform process because the government was unwilling; perhaps even ignorant and the PNC was still wedded to the belief, now unlike Mr. Lewis, that the winnertakes-all Westminster type system was viable. The result is that we have the fairly good formal constitution but not a framework to properly account for the ethnic group interests that pervade our society and thus insubstantial mechanisms for holding our governments accountable.