POPULIST
PRESIDENT
by
Rosa Jordan
In
These Times, August
23, 1993
Cheddi
Jagan charts a new course for Guyana
Guyana’s
new president is 75 years old, his white hair wispy, his impatience
apparent.
Britain, with help from the United States, has thrice removed him
from leadership positions to which he had been fairly elected. Thirty
years have passed since the last time he was, as the New
York Daily News gloatingly
put it, “butchered out of power.” Cheddi Jagan may not be angry
anymore, but his abruptness makes it obvious that he has little
respect for the US or for American journalists.
Guyana’s
most recent election, on October 9, 1992, was not another
force-and-fraud mockery. Jagan attributes that only minimally to
attitude changes at the US State Department. He gives most of the
credit to former president Jimmy Carter, who headed the international
monitoring team. Carter made several common-sense decisions that
saved the election from being aborted, and it was only Carter’s
personal courage in standing up to and then calming down a mob of
opposition rioters that kept the polling in the Guyana capital of
Georgetown from being closed. Consequently, South American’s only
English-speaking nation had its day of democracy. The voters handed
Jagan and his Progressive People’s Party what they had tried to
give him 30 years earlier: the chance to lead an independent Guyana.
Jagan’s
wife, Chicago native Janet Rosenberg, summarized what the Progressive
People’s Party stands for. “The first twenty years we were a
populist party,” she said. “In 1970, we decided to call ourselves
Marxist, and in the Eighties we went back to calling ourselves
populist. But our focus has always been the same: democracy and a
higher standard of living for the people. Basically w e just want to
improve the lot of the people.”
The
word
“democracy” runs like a drumbeat through the president’s
answers to questions. “There can be no development without
democracy. We will put into place elected government at all
levels–municipal, regional, and national.”
But
saying that democracy would solve Guyana’s massive economic
problems seems as airy as saying that love is the solution to war.
Pressed
further, Jagan elaborates: “We will involve people at all levels
and take advantage of their creativity, setting up citizens’
committees in every community, getting farmers and workers involved
in running their own set-up. For example, two years ago it was
decided to close two sugar mills and withdraw 12,000 acres from sugar
production to grow other crops. But employees were not even
consulted. We want to involve workers in decision-making.”
Jagan
will not repeat mistakes of the former Soviet Union. “What stifled
the Soviet economy was its bureaucratic, command-type government.
That’s what we had here. Every level of government was controlled
by the ruling party–by fraud.
Now
we have an elected, democratic administration at the national level,
but we will be going beyond that. People must not vote just every few
years. They must be involved every day in the affairs of the country,
involved in democratic citizens’ committees where they will
organize projects, cleaning up and policing their community.”
Jagan
addresses the subject of money dismissively. “There’s a lot of
money available for rebuilding infrastructure at the local level,
from both government and non-government agencies,” he said. In
Jagan’s view the resources are there, always have been there. The
things missing were grassroots organizations powerful enough to
ensure that the existing resources were used to meet the needs of
ordinary people.
Since
graduating from Northwestern University’s dental school in 1942,
Jagan has spent 49 years doing grassroots organizing in Guyana. Now
that he is president, he says, rather wearily, that he will simply
continue trying to get people involved in organizations that are
structured to give them the collective power to shape the political,
economic, and social forces that affect their lives.
With
dogged persistence, Jagan plods on. His popularity and party support
are now stronger than when he was driven from power. This
presidential victory, he says, is just one more step in the struggle.
He and Janet, who at 72 remains a full and active partner in their
political life, both insist that grassroots democracy works, and that
when put into practice it will enhance the social and economic
well-being of the people who practice
it.
President
Jagan concludes his interview with obvious relief. Perhaps he has
grown tired of trying to explain the advantages of grassroots
democracy to people from a country where it is rarely practiced, let
alone seen as a route to economic prosperity.