Cummingsburg Accord, a work of deception that needs to be exposed - Teixeira
Written by Gina Webmasters, Published in News, Georgetown, GINA, February 19, 2015, Source - GINA
The recently signed ‘Cummingsburg Accord’ which resulted in the declaration of a coalition between the Alliance for Change (AFC) and the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), is not as clear cut as it seems, according to Presidential Adviser Gail Teixeira.
Giving her take on the television programme “Political Scope’ on the National Communications Network on Wednesday, Teixeira said there are a number of critical areas that Guyanese need to be aware of. The first is the assurance that AFC will have 12 seats. “This is absolutely assured, it’s water tight, and the statement by the Speaker the other day, Mr. (Raphael) Trotman made it very clear it was not if they win, it was also if they were not to win, which is a major issue which needs to be looked at”.
The second issue that is quite deceptive, she added, has to do with the presidential powers and the prime ministerial powers. “The other issue is that the AFC and the other will divvy up the Cabinet, 16 to 40; 16% AFC, 40% APNU”.
The accord, Teixeira noted, is merely proposing to get the government out of office, “Let’s get rid of the PPP then we’ll figure it out afterwards. This is what I call the work of deception of the accord and one on the Guyanese public”.
She cited the proposed changes to the Cabinet by the joint opposition as harkening back to the People’s National Congress (PNC) regime. She explained that the constitution provides for the president who can appoint vice presidents. “First amongst VPs is the PM, it doesn’t state how many VPs you can have. Many Guyanese have the memory of these VPs in the pre-1992 days. The Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD) was concerned that the only VP you could entertain was the PM and the constitution does not define how many you can have so basically the president could decide that all his ministers are VPs fundamentally!)
The Forbes Burnham Cabinet which was known, Teixeira said, as the kitchen cabinet…the inner sanctum…that was Mrs. Burnham, the President Burnham, at one time it was Ptolemy Reid, Hammie Green, Corbin, …It harks back to that including now trying to have VPs, and even in the PCD days when we broke up in 1991, it was this absurd formula VPs, of the President and five DPMs as VPs in order to have every party have a piece of the action. What they have done is hogged off the whole thing for themselves and therefore dismissing a number of the smaller parties that are with them”.
The joint alliance has put forward plans to amend the presidential powers. This, the senior government official explained, is already clearly defined.
“The constitution determines the powers of the President, PM, Ministers, parliament, speaker, judges, magistrates, it defines all of that. Whatever they are trying to manufacture, we have to live with what is in the constitution now”.
Guyana is a hybrid republican/Westminster system with an executive president, not a ceremonial president, Teixeira added. She called on young people, who want to know more, to go to the legal affairs website and look at the constitution at Ch. 1:01. “The constitution is very clear, it says the president is Head of State, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and is the supreme executive authority. The constitution also protects and insulates the president in a variety of ways. e.g. in article 96 it talks about the absence of the president and decides that the PM or any other minister acting, cannot dissolve parliament and cannot revoke any of the appointment he has made, to ensure that the president is insulated from coup types. The president in his absence can ask the prime minister or any other minister to chair the cabinet, this is an administrative arrangement”.
Teixeira mentioned Article 107 which deals with the ministerial portfolios, explaining that the president, who appoints under the constitution, does not deal with political party issues. She added, “The parties have a head which GECOM relates to, and indicates the amount of seats won. A party cannot put up members of parliament without the president saying I approve these persons because some of these are going to be ministers. The constitution is very clear though on who appoints. It is the president. The party may send in a list, but it must contain the list of names the president wishes to appoint as ministers”.
The presidential adviser also explained the details contained in Article 111 of the constitution, which deals with the exercise of the president’s powers. “It provides that he can, where it is required by the constitution or by law, that he can get other people’s opinion, or consults on what he has to do. This relates to inclusive governance and power sharing, where the leader of the opposition must have meaningful consultations, and the other part of the constitution states that the president must consult with the leader of the opposition”.
She reiterated that the presidential powers are very clearly enshrined in the constitution of Guyana. “The president is the minister for all, and if he or she determines that information, national security is now going to have a minister, fine, but the constitution already says where there is no minister, the president is the minister”.
The presidential adviser described the areas set out in the Cummingsburg Accord, such as the one stating that the president will be responsible for all these areas, as “a bit of a crock, because in fact, he is that now, the president is the supreme minister of all, and he or she decides I will have 10 or 20 ministries, and here are the portfolios”. She pointed to the fact that, President Ramotar is the minister of information, security and defence, and dismissed the joint opposition political parties’ take on this issue. “So this view that the president will be minister of foreign affairs and so on is crock, because until the president names his ministers, his is the minister of all, he is the supremo. This is a bit of the deception conveyed to the public, here is the leader of the opposition Mr. (David) Granger making this concession, and there is no concession”.
The duties of the prime minister, Teixeira also explained, are made clear by the constitution, describing the appointee as the principal assistant to the president and leader of the House in the National Assembly. “The prime minister normally has a ministerial portfolio. He obviously is the number two person in the country. The four top guys are the president, prime minister, chancellor of the judiciary and the parliamentary speaker”. She added that would be “unthinkable that the prime minister isn’t going to sit and work with his colleagues”, as described in the accord. “It’s a fact that to write this in is rather absurd, because if you’re going to be one government then these are things to be taken normally. The man who swears in the minister is nobody else but the president. So when the president wants to appoint someone without the approval of the AFC, he can go ahead. These are party politics, she mooted, “and not a first past the post and these are issues which are sorted out in the political parties and not in the cabinet. So these are the deceptive nuances of the accord. The constitution is very clear on the fact the PM is the first VP”.
In Teixeira’s opinion the AFC has come out better in the accord than the APNU, explaining that if there was a total of 32 seats, the AFC would get 12 and reduce the APNU to 20 seats. This is a hybrid type of geographic system, she further opined, “If the AFC/APNU reduces the number of geographic seats it gets in the set up then it means they are taking from the top up level. They could get two seats in the actual vote, but they are still guaranteed 12 seats. The constitution speaks about the seats that you can only tinker with the top up seats they cannot move away from that. For the PPP, we got more geographic seats, if their geographic seats drop, they move to the top up, this means AFC are guaranteed that regardless of their performance”.
The aforementioned raises several issues for the political opposition, she added. “What does this mean for APNU and WPA? And the same issue comes when you are looking at the Cabinet. The document clearly says that in the cabinet it will be a 16/40 basis. AFC comes out with a 40% whether they win or not, since APNU will have to divide with WPA, and NFA and JFAP.
Teixeira described the opposition’s arrangement as a marriage of convenience that is really about APNU ensuring that the biggest party in its bloc, the PNC gets its share “otherwise it will have a rebellion. The PNC will make sure they have a majority of the percentage and the smaller parties will be shocked out. The veneer of respectability is that here is the alliance”.
The comments about this being a historic development, she added shows that Opposition Leader Granger may not be aware of the alliances and the fact that they all broke down “when it came to the dividing up of the cake”. She opined that the one in the Burnham era; PNC with the UF, was not a coalition, but contrived by the British Government to get the PPP out in 1964. The PCD attempts again had that problem; the Guard had some of those problems. The PPP/C was the only real alliance, she emphasised. “We have in our midst persons from the PNC and others who pledged their allegiance to the PPP’s presidential candidate”. The ruling party she pointed out never had a 60/40 alliance. “In 1992 when we launched the PPP/C there was no discussion were we to win. Inside the congress, the decision was that the civic would get no more than 20% and they have now taken in up to 45%.”
It was acknowledged by the former minister that some are unable to tell the difference between Civic and PPP, but they never got into the allocation of seats. The PPP/C is a challenge for people to understand, she added, because they have survived as a model of an alliance politics which has very little form to it. “In all the agreements from 1992 we would cede the PM to the Civic and the president to the PPP. If something happened to the president, like Dr Cheddi (Jagan), (Samuel) Hinds held the presidency until Janet (Jagan) was elected. It’s not a watershed accord…it’s an old man’s formula”.
In closing Teixeira stated that the new accord was “a deception of the electorate…this accord has caused some confusion in the APNU particularly in the PNC stalwarts, and with some AFC supporters going over to the APNU. They maybe see the division of 60/40 as more advantageous than sticking with the AFC, but it’s a deception created for the international community and the country, it’s not only a deception but an old formula that has been tried before and failed”.