Hugh Desmond Hoyte A Tribute by ‘Sonny’ Ramphal. London via email Some months before Forbes Burnham died he and I had a conversation that I would long remember. I was at the Commonwealth Secretariat and we were meeting on Commonwealth business; but it became a specially intimate Guyanese moment. Forbes brought up with me the matter of his succession. It was the first time he had ever done so; and he did it without implying an intent to step down; still less a premonition of tragedy. It was as if he needed to talk about it and share his thoughts with someone. I was perhaps one of the few with whom he felt he could do so. He spoke of his early wish to nurture someone in the Party of Indo-Guyanese stock to whom he could eventually pass the mantle; but acknowledged that he had failed. His successor, he recognised, had to come from within the present Cabinet. His clear choice, he told me, was Desmond Hoyte. He was aware, he said, that Desmond did not have a great yearning for the Presidency, but strangely he did not regard that as a deficiency; strangely, because he often voiced his view that a good political leader must have a great hunger for leadership. What determined his choice, he told me, was Desmond’s ‘intellectual integrity’– not just, he stressed, intellectual capacity (though that was essential) but ‘intellectual honesty’. (Those who knew Forbes well can testify to his lifelong distaste of ‘intellectual dishonesty’.) All else, he told me, would follow if that basic quality was present; without it, real leadership was not possible. I was a listener; he was telling me, as if a scribe of his political will, who he wished his successor to be. Six months later, Forbes was gone. Desmond Hoyte, without seeking to, became President. How right Burnham was about both assessments; and how critical to Guyana’s political future they were. It was Desmond’s absence of ‘hunger’ for personal primacy that led to the 1992 General Election and a democratic change of Government – one that could not have occurred unless Desmond Hoyte had acknowledged to himself before the Election that he could live without being President. Guyana owes him a monumental debt for establishing that democratic benchmark. Much later, as a member of the CARICOM team that fashioned the Herdmanston Accord in 1997, when Guyana was on the brink of calamitous political destabilisation, I can testify to Desmond Hoyte’s fundamental commitment to these democratic values, and his statesmanship in carrying his Party with him. And how manifest too was that quality of intellectual integrity. It was this that sustained Desmond Hoyte through his quite remarkable period in office that saw fundamental policy changes in Guyana without an all too fashionable debunking of the past. Desmond knew that it was time for policy change on the economic front in particular; but he knew too that he had to inaugurate a new environment of non-racial governance – as others before and after him were to try to do as well. In this matter, failure does not rest only or directly with the political leadership. The forces of race so happily benign at the social and cultural level are so sadly virulent at the broad political level that they overwhelm the best leadership intentions. Before we blame our leaders we must blame ourselves. Desmond and Joyce Hoyte were our family friends. Our youngest daughter was in the age group of the Hoyte girls who died so tragically in 1985, and their close friend. We shared their grief as ‘family’ and admired from close range the astonishing strength with which Desmond carried on his political life; and we knew how both he and Joyce suffered. Of all this is a public life comprised; but how seldom we allow our judgements to encompass them. As I pay my tribute to a friend and a political leader who has passed on I feel deeply that Guyana, for all its present problems, is a better place because Desmond Hoyte was there to bridge the Presidencies of Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan, and in doing so to establish those markers of national democracy and personal integrity that are the monuments already erected by his life of service to Guyana. Such leadership bridges that offer confident passage to a new era are essential to national progress. May Desmond Hoyte’s passing be the occasion to apply to Guyana’s polity the highest values toward which he reached, however much they eluded his own grasp in his lifetime.