The year of legal dictatorship
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
February 23, 2007
Thousands and thousands of Guyanese and visitors will converse on public avenues and public pathways today to celebrate another year of republicanism. The festivities are known as Mashramani but few people connect Mashramani with republicanism.
One reason for this is because Mashramani has taken its place among West Indian annual carnivals. When February 23 comes around, it is time to Mash down. But February 23 also has another meaning. It marks the decisive break with Guyana 's political, constitutional and legal traditions.
In 1970, there was no new constitution. Guyana still had the Independence constitution which was patterned after the Westminster system. But the legal declaration of republicanism was the first step towards republican dictatorship. It came in 1980 with a new constitution.
In February 1980, Guyana joined a long list of republican dictatorships. The inevitable vortex of violence followed. Four months after the 1980 constitution was legally framed on the walls of this nation, just as it happened in other authoritarian polities, a popular opposition leader, Walter Rodney, was assassinated.
The 1980 Guyana Constitution is a Macbethian brew of power, omnipotence and invincibility. It is a devilish document that makes the President of Guyana an absolute oligarch.
In what must remain as one of the most despicable moments in Caribbean politics, the architect of the 1980 constitution, Dr. Mohamed Shahabudeen cited the greater freedoms the new constitution brought.
In effect what this new dispensation did was to create a virtual one-man ownership of Guyana . It sickens my mind to know that the author of such a fiendish policy could today sit in one of the UN's most prestigious legal forums.
Professor of law, Rudy James of UG, explained how the 1980 Constitution works.
When you read into his evaluation, the mischief in the 1980 Constitution is as clear as a sunny day in Georgetown . You find that one article empowers the legislature to recall the president. Then with nasty intention, you find another article gives the president the right to dissolve the legislature.
In real terms then, the president's power is absolute because if the legislature begins to debate his impeachment, in the midst of the deliberations, he just signs an order putting the legislature out of existence. These kinds of invidious, insidious, farcical, paradoxes line the pages of the 1980 Constitution.
One of the greatest ironies to have occurred in this country is the present willingness of the PNC to change the 1980 Constitution. Yet every year on February 20, the PNC extols the virtues of Burnham as a great leader.
Well, there has to be a monumental contradiction here. How can a leader be a good governor yet the framework through which he ruled and which he invented is so flawed that it has to be changed.
It is for this reason one should not commit oneself to the idea that the PNC is a born again democratic organisation.
The PNC is faced with a Sisyphean task that a million Einsteins cannot perform successfully. Sisyphus in Greek mythology was ostracised by the gods and his punishment was to push a stone uphill. The stone kept rolling down back. It couldn't stay. The laws of physics made that an impossibility. If Burnham was a great leader then let us glorify the 1980 Constitution because it was the work of a brilliant, superb achiever, Forbes Burnham.
The celebration of Mashramani is a lasting reminder of what happened to this country from 1970 onwards. We should never do away with it because its presence tells us about the consequences of republicanism.
It is not that republican status was irrelevant for Guyana at that time. It was not. Even British oriented Barbados is contemplating a move away from the monarchy. It is what Burnham used the new political system for. He manipulated the new political ethos to shape a blueprint that allowed for the concretisation of absolute power.
There can hardly be any debate that Burnham was a man gifted with superior political skills. Political planning was his forte. It was only when Walter Rodney came upon the scene that Burnham's manoeuvrability and strategies dried up. He simply had no answer for Rodney.
It could be argued though that in fairness to Burnham that he may not have killed Rodney if the WPA had eschewed the path of violent confrontation. We will never now that.
On the other hand, it may be contended that even if Rodney had evolved a peaceful strategy of overthrow of the Burnham regime, Burnham may still have panicked and got rid of him.
One had to be part of the experiences of the seventies to understand the
power, persuasion and invincibility of Walter Rodney. He was the reincarnation of the anti-colonial fighter that swept the colonial world after WW2.
What Burnham saw in Rodney was the re-birth of himself.This is what made Burnham so scared of Rodney. Burnham appealed to the masses. He was perceived as this learned man that would chase away the colonials and deliver Guyana to the Guyanese.
Thirty years after, Rodney was seen by Guyanese as the man who would correct the post-colonial wrongs of those that has succeed the British.
It is thirty-seven years since Guyana removed the Queen as the symbolic head of the land, but from that fateful year of 1970, Guyana 's destiny with despotic rule was bound to damage the nerve centre of this country.
As I opined above, Burnham was made of superior political skills. Republicanism, the 1980 Constitution, and the adumbration of socialist political economy were all planned long in advance.
Some say that these institutions gradually evolved and that Burnham didn't start out with all these ideas in mind. This is where the man's exemplary skills came into play. Burnham had it all worked out. Under a socialist system with a constitution that guaranteed power, Burnham knew his goals of permanent power could only be encapsulated in a republican form of government.
The year 1970 then was the beginning of the reign of a new colonialism, this time without the British anthem and the British Governor. How strange we still celebrate the year that ushered in the great dictatorship.