During the recent fracas in the National Assembly, Labor Minister Joseph Hamilton is said to have ridiculed the opposition by asking them what they had done for Africa during their term of office. To this it is reported that some members have responded that they are not there to do things for black people as such. This is not an unusual question for people in political parties that differ from their ethnicity having to field or try to use it to defend their particular position. In January last year, former Prime Minister Samuel Hinds wrote a letter to the press that said some very unusual things about Africa and drew the attention of Mr Lincoln Lewis, who asked him to ‘show this nation what it has done’ to do for the community in Africa. ‘ Sam replied by highlighting the PPP government’s 1992-2015 achievements in general, but this did not please Lincoln: ‘Sam must put his record on the table. It must account for its (personal) performance… ‘(SN: 20/01/2021). Indian members of the Alliance for Change (AFC) have been particularly plagued by similar questions in relation to the sacking of the sugar workers.
If 90% of the coalition’s support came from Africa, how can their MPs suggest that it cannot be made legal for them to show what they have done to the people of Africa ?! Who do they represent? Such representation does not prevent one from striving to build a multiracial party. Certainly, an MP should be in a position to disaggregate in some way his personal contributions from those of his government. Today in democratic countries there is an expectation that MPs’ work record should be there for all to see and assess: how often they attend parliament, what views they have taken on different topics, what laws they are proposed, how they voted, who their supporters are, their arrangements for meeting constituents, etc. In Guyana hardly any of this information is readily available but there is much talk of holding politicians to account.
The problem is multidimensional. The arrangement of the list when combined with the proportional representation (PR) electoral system currently in place appears to have seriously reduced the independence of MPs. My series on constitutional reform has already called for radical changes in the list and constituency systems (Future Notes, SN: 12/08/2020). However, in historically representative democratic politics at Westminster MPs have a dual responsibility: to the constituencies that voted for them and to the nation. Their job is to identify their constituency interests and try to include these for the national benefit. Developed in a homogeneous society, while allowing accommodation for class interests, the traditional Westminster system rejects and ridicules those who speak for and advocate for ethnic interests.
Guyanese is a product of this type of system and holds this bias. When people, including MPs, consider and talk about Guyanese politics, they also try to avoid ethnic interests and speak in terms of arrangements and outcomes that are more suited to homogeneous societies like Barbados and Jamaica. However, they would have spoken entirely differently if they had been socialized in the European way of doing politics where the ethnic diversity of many countries has historically forced the population and their representatives to have to reconcile three interconnected interests: constitutional, ethnic and national. It would be better to include the ethnic diversity of Suriname and Guyana with this kind of representative system and there the question of what you have done for Black / Indian / First peoples would be appropriate at constituency and national levels.
As the populations of many homogeneous countries become more ethnically diverse they also have to deal with the objectives expressed by the relatively small ethnic groups and have developed mechanisms to do this, such as ethnic audits. There is, of course, the raw Marxist / materialist theory of ethnicity, which implies that the great contradiction in society is class and that ethnic alienation is a result of the elite exploitation of economic inequalities and will be resolved with a more equitable distribution of wealth , has been for a long time. heavy empirical criticisms ruin them. (Eriksen, TH (2002) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, Culture, Anthropology and Society Series, 2nd ed., London: Pluto Press). The exact nature of the question ‘what have you done for group x?’ speaks to a similar erroneous idea in both political parties that Guyana’s rival political system allows them to prove that they have done or can do better for the other side! There will always be relative scarcity and the question of what is sufficient for any ethnic group is a politically contentious one that every ethnic group of sufficient size and / or profitable location has strived to do for itself . The storming of the United States Congress after the last presidential election suggests that ethnic relations are affected by perceptions of the location of this political power.
However, audits that determine what the different ethnic groups value and the extent to which these requirements are met could facilitate discourse facilitation, policy making and, where necessary, potentially become final solution base. In 2016 the UK government announced that it would be conducting a Race Discrimination Audit to uncover the ‘uncomfortable truths’ about ethnic differences: differences of treatment or outcomes experienced by people of different ethnicities in all public services and departments of’ government. The objective of the audit was to promote positive change through the transparency of data taken from many government datasets. Among others, it dealt with the percentage of pupils meeting the expected standards in reading by ethnicity, the percentage of households owning their own homes, weekly income by ethnicity and ethnic representation in the police force relationship with the community served. Ethnic minorities generally achieve worse outcomes than white people but on many measures the differences between ethnic minorities are more significant than between ethnic minorities in aggregate and white people. By some measures, it is the white British group that achieves the worst results (https://www.ohchr.org / Documents / Issues / Racism / WGEAPD / Session 24 / MarcusBell .pdf).
The well-being of the different ethnic groups is important and should be recognized and represented constitutionally and otherwise openly, but in order to do so they need to identify what they want and where they stand in relation to goals of the such. Ideally, the state, perhaps through its parliamentary human rights commission, could establish, monitor and comment periodically on an audit-type arrangement. I have recently asserted that the Ethnic Relations Commission ‘has no effect because it cannot do so unless the ongoing ethnic political warfare is wiped out, and this cannot be achieved without consensual forms of political accommodation.’ However, as the ethnic parties that currently dominate the state are unlikely to want to undermine the source of their propaganda by producing more scientific data, perhaps the ‘independent’ Ethnic Relations Commission could take hold this work thereby making a more meaningful contribution. Of course, at the micro level all stakeholders such as those currently involved in work related to the United Nations International Decade for People of African descent, Guyana Human Rights Association and others should acquire and monitor such ethnic information individually or in collaboration.