To move their citizens from an endemic state of war that made their lives “nasty, short and brutish”, the architects of modern Europe introduced the forms and substance of democratic governance. This served as the basis of their unprecedented progress since the 19th Century and was held up to us as an ideal to strive for after independence if we were to pull ourselves out of our poverty and underdevelopment that was our colonial legacy. Form and substance were inextricably linked through the institutions of State and Government to which we the people would confer power to supervise progress towards the good life for all.
We in Guyana accepted as our base line that our supreme law was a constitution, promulgated by we the people and which especially those entrusted with state and governmental power had to obey. Even when the People’s National Congress (PNC) under Burnham created a dictatorship, he genuflected to these overriding principles by enacting a new Constitution that was supposed to have been approved by the people through a referendum but which ironically gave him supreme powers. These were curtailed by extensive constitutional changes enacted and implemented in 2000, after being unanimously approved by the two major parties, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and PNC.
We retained a parliamentary, majoritarian governmental system in which the people voted for their representatives. The party with a majority of Members of Parliament (MPs) had control of the legislative branch (the National Assembly) even though they needed only to have a plurality to secure the Presidency and form the Executive Branch. The other parties would constitute an Opposition that would “shadow” the Government in and out of Parliament by critiquing its activities and proposing alternative policies. As such, the electorate would be able to choose between them at the next elections to form the next government.
In Guyana, there were a number of changes in the governance structures to make them more inclusive of the Opposition. The most significant were four Sectoral Committees in the National Assembly that can scrutinise the full gamut of governmental activities in real time – Foreign Relations, Social Services, Economic Services and Natural Resources. These were in addition to the traditional Public Accounts Committee that audited governmental spending.
It is against this background that we must evaluate the actions of the PNC-led Opposition which breached all the conventions of democracy in general, and the rules of the National Assembly in particular, to storm the governmental benches and raucously prevent the Minister of Finance from presenting the third and final reading of the Government’s Natural Resource Fund (NRF) Bill. Most egregiously, PNC MP Annette Ferguson rushed the Speaker’s Seat and seized the Mace in an illegal effort to strip him of the authority over Parliament that it represents. The Mace had to be wrestled from Ferguson by a parliamentary staff during which he was racially abused by another PNC MP.
The reason proffered by the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) Opposition for their illegal actions was that the Government did not extend the time for consultations on the NRF Bill, as they had demanded. Now, the Government had already complied with the timeframe for Parliamentary Readings of Bills and the Opposition did not deign to present any comments on what was basically modifications of the NRF Bill they had passed and ought to have been totally au fait with the details.
The PNC-led Opposition, then in Government, had introduced and passed their NRF Bill – which had to have been just as important for stakeholders to examine. But they did this in the absence of the then Opposition PPP, which was protesting the former’s refusal to resign after a successful No-Confidence Motion. At no time did they concede the PPP’s position on the need for Opposition input to confer legitimacy to the Bill. Nothing had changed. This circumstance reveals that the non-acquiescence to the demand for extra time was not the cause of the war – which the storming of the Government benches represented – but merely the occasion for it.
