…into Anarchy
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Yeats wrote those lines just after WWI, when the victorious British were turning to Ireland to “pacify” its peoples. Your Eyewitness was reminded of the poem when he saw Policemen enter Parliament Chamber to arrest a (literally) sitting Member of Parliament. It’s clear the Speaker was willing to dash centuries of tradition overboard to allow the law of the jungle to overcome the “rule of law”. That rule is epitomised by the observation that even the King has to bow to the force of the law. And interestingly, that’s no hyperbole, but arose out of an actual event that the Speaker – if he has any claim to occupying his position, should be familiar with.
Back in 1642, King Charles I peremptorily entered the House of Commons – our parliamentary model – with his men to arrest five MPs who had already decamped. The King demanded he be told the whereabouts of the missing MPs and the Speaker of the House uttered his immortal response: “May it please Your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here, and I humbly beg Your Majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what Your Majesty is pleased to demand of me.”
The King, as the head of what would become the “Executive” in the developing British democracy, departed and since that time – almost 500 years later – no King has entered the Assembly of the People – much less his Policemen!! So, if there were any need to make graphic Guyana’s descent into anarchy and totalitarianism under the onslaught be the PNC/APNU/AFC, the barbarism on display in Parliament on Monday provided it.
Of course, the rule is the ruling of the Speaker must be upheld. But behind that rule is the Principle that the Speaker represents ALL the members of the House. This Speaker has abused that rule time and again against the Opposition MPs and once he did that, he broke the contract between them.
Equity demands that an MP must question Executive spending – and the Speaker has the authority to bend Procrustean to give life to the Principle. He refused.
It is clear the centre cannot hold – and Guyana is plunged into anarchy.
…into habitual lying
The coarseness of the PNC’s minions in aping the forms of civilisation while engaging in the most despicable behaviour was also illustrated recently by Basil Williams – who has to be the most inept AG in the history of Guyana. It began with Williams promising Guyana a law school, the JOF Haynes Law School, as a Public-Private Partnership between the Government of Guyana and some entities no one has ever heard about – the Law School of the Americas (LCA) and the University College of the Caribbean (UCC).
That was the tell-tale sign of a hustle in progress because as late as three weeks ago, Williams kept assuring the school would materialise in 2018 even though the “feasibility study” hadn’t been done!! But there was an even greater obstacle: the Caricom Council For Legal Education had never given the necessary permission for the school.
When this was revealed last week, Williams claimed his bete noirs “Carl and Anil did him in”!! The former Chancellor Carl Singh comprehensively rubbished this claim.
Poor Williams…he still “too fraid a Carl”!!
