The PPP on Trial: British Guiana in 1953

Introduction

On 14 September 2003, the Sunday edition of the Stabroek News published an article dealing with a recent World Bank draft report on Guyana:

Guyana's contemporary crisis is in a very profound sense, a crisis of governance. The social and economic problems facing the country and its inability to develop its fabled resource capital, is in the final analysis, the result of political factors, which are deeply embedded in and driven by the country's demographic realities and historical experiences. The crisis is also due to the failure of the post-independence political class to do the things necessary to transcend that historical and demographic inheritance.¹

This excerpt of the document, appearing some fifty years after the first election in British Guiana based upon universal suffrage in 1953, provides a frank and realistic assessment of political life of the former British Guiana.

This essay situates the contemporary "crisis of governance" in Guyana within the context of 1953, when the People's Progressive Party (PPP) rose to prominence through its victory at the polls. The central argument is that the events of 1953 fractured the nascent political triumph of the nationalist movement and undermined the search for a new constitutional order that would accommodate both self-government and social cohesion in a multiethnic British Guiana/Guyana. The country has not recovered from the crisis of political legitimacy of that critical year. The crisis unleashed the centrifugal tendencies within the colony, and the nationalist leadership thereafter adopted strategies of ethnic/racial mobilization that have left it unable "to do the things necessary to transcend the historical and demographic inheritance." This essay argues that the crisis of 1953 in British Guiana was a product of the political immaturity (if not näiveté) of the PPP leadership and its collective failure to understand the constraints under which it operated. In effect, it is possible to argue that the PPP leadership failed to recognize that winning the elections was only the first step in governing the colony—a failure from which the party has never recovered and that contributes to the "crisis of governance" identified by the World Bank in 2003. In sum, the 1953 elections demonstrated the popular appeal of the PPP but left open the question of its competence to govern—and fifty years later very little has changed.

This essay also helps to widen the context in which the 1953 events should be considered. It suggests the ways in which the events in British Guiana represented the intensification of the crisis of colonial rule in the British West Indian colonies, a crisis that rocked the Caribbean in the 1930s. In British Guiana, the introduction of universal suffrage and internal self-government was part of the reform strategy implemented by the British government in response to labor unrest in the colony in 1948. The Colonial Office recognized that the changes in British Guiana were far-reaching and that the pace of future reform would be measured by the progress achieved under the new dispensation. For the nationalist leadership in British Guiana, the elections of 1953 represented an effort to accelerate the process of constitutional devolution within the colony and within the wider West Indian context. The clash of expectations between the Imperial government and the nationalist movement in British Guiana led to the suspension of the constitution and the fracturing of the nationalist movement. The events in 1953 represented a historic reversal of the process of constitutional devolution to which the British government had committed itself in the postwar period. Just as important, this essay also highlights the level of fragmentation within the PPP and the wider society in 1953, which contributed to the breakdown of the Waddington constitution. This essay details the factional infighting within the PPP, which limited the party's effectiveness as an agent of executive power, and the ways in which the governor and the business community exploited the situation to provoke military intervention by the Imperial government...