The will of the people

Last week’s account of the travails of Jamaica’s former Minister of Agriculture Floyd Green, whose occupancy of the portfolio crashed and burned swiftly after he had been ‘caught on camera’ transgressing the protocols associated with the so-called No Movement Day, one of the mechanisms now in place in Jamaica designed to help push back what now threatens to become a Covid-19 tsunami, would not, one feels, have gone altogether unnoticed here in Guyana.

Green’s transgression, reportedly, was responded to with a feral blast in Jamaica, characterized, reportedly, by public blunt and boisterous calls for him to demit office. Those, it seemed, were sufficient to cause him to turn in his portfolio and to issue a statement dripping with expressions of regret and contriteness. In effect, the former Jamaican Minister of Agriculture was acquiescing to his understanding of the national political culture which instructed that his standing as a leader had been compromised by his inexcusable delinquency to a point where his own constituency, the political party that he represents and the nation as a whole, had ‘ruled’ that he had to go. That is how Jamaica’s political culture ‘rolls.’

Culturally, Guyana is not situated a million miles away from Jamaica. Both countries are members of CARICOM and the structure of our respective political systems and institutions were both shaped in large measure by our colonial inheritance. Some of our socioeconomic challenges have been identical too. In the instance of Green the primary lesson here has to do with whether the will of the people of Jamaica does not, in fact, place compelling restraints on the public prerogatives of the personages whom the people decide, by way of ballot, would lead them. These prerogatives which, as the instance of Mr. Green now demonstrates, are by no means, blank cheques. They extend beyond the processes and outcomes of the polling itself, the counting of the ballots and the declaration of a winner. Much more to the point is the fact that there are circumstances under which the prerogative of individual office can be withdrawn through mechanisms that stop short of collapsing the entire political infrastructure.

In terms of its newsworthiness, the Floyd Green story would by now have been overtaken by other events of national import in Jamaica. The matter would have been, for all intents and purposes, done and dusted. Hell may well have frozen over first before Green would have ‘walked’ or perhaps even made to ‘walk’ had his indiscretion occurred under a political administration, any political administration, in this jurisdiction. That’s not how we ‘roll’ here.

It has been said, previously, and it is worth repeating here, that the institutional trappings of periodic polling, the declaration of a victor

and the procedural assigning of control of the state to the victor counts for little if the will of the people does not remain part of the governance equation. When you cede the will of the people to the political party in office you essentially surrender one of those tools in the absence of which democracy becomes a mere chimera. There is a considerable school of thought to the effect that this is the biggest elephant in this country’s political living room.

Here, the question as to whether, had Mr. Floyd Green been a Guyanese Minister, the transgression to which he so unpretentiously admitted would have been forthcoming in the first place and whether, even if it were, he would have been required to surrender his portfolio and to clear his desk and ‘hit the road’ without some tedious and convoluted political pushback, is highly debatable. Our own political parties can sometimes become caught up in their contrived infallibility in their predisposition that confuses the notion of the right to rule, which is a function of the vicissitudes of the expression of the will of the people and the right to make the rules, which is decidedly not.

Over time we have grown accustomed to enduring some of the more outrageous official pushbacks against the will of the people, not a trait, one must stress, that is unique to any side of the political divide. The tendency to treat the will of the people as though it were no more important than a discarded dishcloth has been manifested in the behaviour of political administrations in Guyana over the entire period of the country’s political independence. It is this that might well have made the contriteness of Mr. Green and the decision made by his political party to bow to the will of the people and let him go seem like such a ‘big deal’ to us in Guyana.