In his address to Parliament last Thursday, one hopes President Granger appreciated the irony of the sentiments he expressed and the unprecedented tumultuous protests it elicited from the entire Opposition, numbering just one seat less that his Government’s. The President intoned: “The Constitution, at Article 65 (1), enjoins Parliament to: “…make laws for the peace, order and good government of Guyana. The Nation continues to consolidate this happy state of comity which it has enjoyed over the past thirty months.
“A multi-party coalition assumed office and ushered in an opportunity for consensus-based politics. This form of government wrested the Nation from the vice of divisive and destructive winner-takes-all politics and laid the basis for a system of inclusionary democracy – the form of governance prescribed by the Constitution, at Article 13. That is the form that seeks cooperation for the ‘common good’ rather than one that fosters confrontation and chaos.”
On the other hand, Opposition Leader Bharat Jagdeo explained his party engaged in its protest because the President refused to address, “the major issues affecting Guyanese –the crime and how he will tackle the increase in crime; how he will tackle the increased loss of jobs in our economy; how he would tackle investments. (And) Then we got a lecture about the rule of law and good governance, when, effectively, what he has been doing is undermining the rule of law by acting unconstitutionally.”
While the Government may believe it is governing for the “common good”, they would be hard pressed to justify the President’s claim the country has “enjoyed” a “happy state of comity…over the past thirty months.” In the end, “good intentions” are not what counts but the actions to make those intentions manifest. For instance, even though it campaigned on a commitment to form a “Government of National Unity”, including even members of the PPP, after it acceded to power with a razor-sharp majority its actions demonstrated a complete occupation of the national political space to the exclusion of even the minority members of its coalition.
As Opposition Leader Bharat Jagdeo intimated, the President has become characterised by his set rhetorical deliveries in Parliament and other ceremonial occasions, which are belied by his unilateral partisan actions. This gap, which over time has grown into a yawning chasm, appears to be fuelled by the major partner of the coalition government – the Peoples National Government (PNC) via its leader President Granger and its confrontational actions appears to have been the ultimate cause for the Opposition PPP’s parliamentary protest rather than the latter’s unilateral appointment of Justice James Patterson to the GECOM Chair, which can be seen as the latest proximate cause.
Some of those inflammatory actions would include the arbitrary dismissal of scores of top level government officials and technocrats in government agencies; the scrapping of the PPP’s Youth Entrepreneurship and Apprenticeship Programme (YEAP) for Amerindians and the abrupt “downsizing” of GuySuCo. These impacted the PPP’s constituencies so overwhelmingly, they elicited cries of “ethnic cleansing” from some quarters. While the latter charge was certainly exaggerated in light of what actually constitutes that term, it connoted the dire impact precipitated by the government’s actions vis a vis its promises.
The proximate cause of the unilateral GECOM appointment , however, symbolises President Granger’s leadership insistence of style over substance. He arbitrarily abandoned the GECOM process in which he had personally participated (his name had been submitted twice by President Hoyte) without objection. He dismissed the interpretation of a specially crafted Constitutional provision by the very persons that legislated it and even of the Court that was asked to evaluate his idiosyncratic “perception”. He insulted the competency of thatA coequal branch of government when he referred to the ruling of the Chief Justice (ag) as her “perception”.
The Government has criticised the PPP’s protest in Parliament as not observing the “forms” of parliamentary proprietary. The question that has to be asked is whether the President and his government have not violated the substance of parliamentary governance.
