Guyana under siege

PARLIAMENT is comprised of the President, the Speaker, the Clerk of the National Assembly, and the National Assembly.

The National Assembly is made up of 65 Members of Parliament, elected under a mixed Proportional Representation electoral system, with 25 seats coming from the 10 Administrative Geographic Regions, and 40 from the National Top-Up.
The Prime Minister is the Leader of the House, and Ministers of the Government must be Members of Parliament.
The President, as provided for in the Constitution, may appoint an additional four (4) technocratic, non-voting Ministers, and two (2) non- voting Parliamentary Secretaries to the National Assembly.
The Constitution explicitly defines, and provides for, the division of power among the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches.
The PPP had always intended to revise the Constitution, except that the process, which was time-consuming and lengthy, had been placed on the back-burner while the new government invested all its time, energies and resources into trying to put Guyana back on its socio-economic track, because the needs of the people were paramount and extant in urgent ways in every sector.
It was a Herculean task to even put a dent in the then countrywide devastation that the PNC had left in this country; but their murderous and destructive rampages, through Hoyte’s “slo’fiah, mo’ fiah” strategy, that razed dozens of businesses, destroyed private and public properties, with innocent citizens, especially entrepreneurs, and policemen being wantonly robbed and slaughtered; and even babies asleep in their beds and a sitting minister of government and his family being butchered, forced the government to curtail developmental imperatives and bend to the Opposition’s will, as Dr. Cheddi Jagan was forced to do with Duncan Sandys when the nefarious ‘X-13 Plan’ was unleashed on his people.
Member States of CARICOM, which shared a ‘buddy-buddy’ relationship at Heads-of-State level with Forbes Burnham, and at the governmental level with the PNC — although it was widely known that the PNC was keeping itself in power through rigged elections combined with internal terrorism — never once, during that legendary and infamous 28 years of despotic PNC rule, interceded to provide support to Dr. Jagan’s just cause; but their intercession when the PNC was on its “slo’ fiah, mo’ fiah” rampage was mainly on the PNC’s behalf, and forced concessions inimical to the PPP/C administration, which, again, as in the Duncan Sandys farce, was forced to make concessions inimical to its own interests, such as truncating its term in office by two years.
Consequent to these concessions, the 1999 – 2001 broad-based Constitutional Reform Commission and the resulting constitutional reforms were unanimously agreed by the parliamentary political parties through an extensive, inclusive consultative process that included communities across the 10 Administrative Regions, and civil society.
This was then followed by an intensive parliamentary reform process (2002-2006) which created an expanded committee system, and enhanced oversight of all facets of government, supported by revised Standing Orders in both 2006 and 2011. Thus was created one of the best parliamentary models in the world, which gave the parliamentary Opposition great sway and great say in the governance of the country, especially in the economic affairs, through the Public Accounts Committee, the permanent chair of which the government conceded to the opposition, even when the PPP/C had majority in parliament.
This was a perfect model for shared governance, because every minister, including the Prime Minister, and head of every governmental institution and department is subject to minute scrutiny by these parliamentary committees.
However, all these constitutional norms and processes, including the Parliamentary Standing Orders, have been violated in a multiplicity of ways over the years subsequent to elections of November 2011, which has now made the National Assembly a farcical and comical blot on the landscape of such august Houses anywhere in the world.
A continuation of this farce is the AFC’s walkout of Parliament prior to the presentation by Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh of Budget 2014, on what could best be described as farcical and puerile grounds, which, of course, is driving its own agenda of destabilising the country to make the PPP/C government fail and/or look bad.
This is also the situation with the PNC/APNU combo, with the nonsensical pronouncements being uttered by Opposition leader, David Granger.
This is a forewarning that the government and the nation would once again be subjected to the joint Opposition’s debilitating and destructive anti-developmental utterances and actions as occurred post-2012 and 2013 Budget presentations.
The writing is on the wall for all to read.

excerpts from the Guyanachronicle