Guyanese should ask AFC leaders to be strategically silent

https://www.kaieteurnewsonline...trategically-silent/

Jan 24, 2019 | Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I am convinced that Moses Nagamootoo has become one of the most discredited politicians in Guyana’s history. Even if the construct called APNU+AFC should regain power, I think his political career has come to an end. Even if he is offered a Cabinet post in the next coalition government, I doubt he will be nationally seen as an asset.

The choice he made was his own. Throughout the entirety of this country, he is not seen as a major player that has done good for Guyana. Could it be that because he is self-conscious of his self-destruction that he has thrown caution to the wind and is sounding more outrageous on each occasion that he opens his mouth since the APNU+AFC lost a no-confidence motion (NCM)?

Nagamootoo said that a constitution should not allow for an elected government to be removed from power. He does not agree with a government falling through an NCM. Since he made that ignorant observation, two democracies had NCMs – the UK and Greece. The same Nagamootoo submitted through his party, the AFC, an NCM in 2014, which eventually led to the shortening of the Ramotar presidency.

In some countries, there is a form of NCM named impeachment. Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representative. Elected Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached by the country’s legislature. Does Nagamootoo understand what the separation of power is? He does not, which is unforgivable for a man who says he has more than forty years in politics.

An NCM gives power to the legislature to remove the executive if the legislature feels the executive has broken the social contract. This is straight out of the philosophical works of Thomas Hobbes. Nagamootoo had to do Hobbes when he entered UG to do first year law.

The NCM or the impeachment law gives the legislature ultimate say over an executive that is out of control.

If Nagamootoo has any sense of politics, he would support the retention of the NCM in Guyana’s constitution because I think Nagamootoo’s formation, the APNU+AFC, will have a chance to use the NCM mechanism again as it did in 2014 because after the next election, there will be a minority presidency and it may not be from Nagamootoo’s APNU+AFC.

What is strange is that since the NCM controversy, the politicians who are speaking more on the subject, sprouting nonsense are from the AFC. If you minus Basil Williams, there is mostly silence from the rest of the PNC war room. Each time, you peruse the newspapers, it is the AFC leaders who are mouthing off and in the process embarrassing themselves and the country.

It is being asked all over Guyana if the votes of foreign-born MPs prior to December 21, 2018 can be sustained if the court rules that Charrandass Persaud was ineligible to vote.

This is what the court is being asked to rule on. It is so simple that a moron can understand it. Does the constitution prevent an MP from voting because he/she is a foreign citizen? If yes, then Persaud and all others have been illegally sitting in the House. Ramjattan says no. Even if the judge rules in favour of the government, the ruling can only apply to Charrandass.

Then Ramjattan told the media that the AFC has not lost support whatsoever. He went on to add that the AFC strength as a party and its electoral power are virtually intact and in contesting the next election with APNU the request for forty percent of Cabinet position is valid by virtue of that strength.
How can any politician want to appear so foolish in the eyes of the nation literally two months after its complete annihilation in the local government poll? How can any politician say it should get forty percent of Cabinet positions after the next general election when that party could not win one; let us repeat for emphasis, not even one, Local Government Authority (LGAs) out of 88?

But there is a retort. The AFC will say it did not contest in all the 88, only in 38. But here is the where the embarrassment is even more humiliating. If you say we are good and strong in only 38 LGAs, and it is useless to compete in the other 58 LGAs, then surely, you are openly and graphically saying that in those 38 LGAs, is where you are popular. Yet the AFC did not win one LLA in those 38 constituencies. How can you still survive as a viable entity when even in your own identified localities you cannot win one LGA?