From Kwame McCoy to Donald Ramotar to Manzoor Nadir

I begin this column with the bold declaration that I would be the last person in the world to be flippant about the lack of education in people. My parents nurtured seven children and none of us made it to high school. We hardly had food to carry us through primary school much less the secondary level. Poverty in our household was simply staggering.

Poverty should force one to pull out all the stops in search of an education. Once you acquire some resources, however meagre, education should be in your sight. I remember that before he joined the PPP, Mr. Manzoor Nadir drove a taxi and his base was his home in Garnett Street. After getting into government, Mr. Nadir never looked back. But however intellectually limited we are, however poor our background, we must strive to be thinking people.

My deeply honest opinion is that what Manzoor said about the no-confidence clause in our constitution constitutes ignorance that is so sickening and disgusting that he should apologize to God who made him. Nadir said that for a no-confidence vote to succeed, all the members of the National Assembly have to be present.

Let me say to readers that I am not engaging Manzoor Nadir. You may dislike me for the next few lines you are about to read, you may think that I am arrogant and pompous when I say that I think so little of Manzoor Nadir that I cannot bring myself to have a debate with him. If you think so of me, then maybe I deserve it, but this is my sincere attitude to Mr. Nadir. At least I have not hidden my feeling.

I write this column on Nadir because I am disgusted to the core on what the PPP is doing to my country. How can the PPP produce a parliamentarian who was one of their Ministers that can say such an ignorant thing that it automatically causes you to see him as a person without dignity? Prior to Nadir, I truly believe the PPP should have removed Neil Kumar from its group of parliamentarians for the inanities that come out of his mouth.

Let us repeat what Manzoor has publicly said. If the opposition tables a no-confidence motion it cannot be effective unless when the vote was taken all the members of the House were present. Could there be a more diseased manifestation of ignorance? A vote of no-confidence is to remove a government. Surely that government has a head, be it a Prime Minister or President. Surely that Prime Minister or President has parliamentarians that are loyal to him/her and would not want to see the government fall.

So all the head of government has to do, is to instruct his trusted apparatchiks not to attend that particular sitting of Parliament, and there can never, I repeat, never, be a successful no-confidence motion. There is absolutely no complexity about it. What Nadir has actually said is that the Guyana Constitution does not in fact have a no-confidence clause.

There can be no other interpretation. If I am the Prime Minister and you put a no-confidence motion against me, I will not go to parliament on the day of the voting and I will tell my loyal lieutenants not to attend too. Thus I cannot be removed. In the twisted, convoluted, comical logic of Manzoor Nadir, a no-confidence motion is an impossibility. It becomes impossible because you can kill it by one or two or three or four parliamentarians staying away.

Here then is what will happen in October when Parliament convenes. The Speakers put the motion before the House. The debate proceeds. The voting takes place. But this was just a waste of time, because the PPP parliamentarians did not attend the sitting, therefore the motion cannot be carried.

The question that must be asked is, if the PPP leadership came up with this stale milk and gave Nadir to run with it. It meant, therefore, they asked Nadir to take the humiliation. One should seriously think about this. It may not have been Nadir’s asininity at all. Could it have been the idea of the “goat nah bite meh man”? Could it have been the discovery of the legal mind who when he was in the Cabinet called a press conference and told the media, “I is a man who like fuh do illegal things.”

But wait a minute! Could this guy be the culprit? Since he says he does illegal things he could have concocted this miasmic recipe. Is it possible Kwame McCoy thought of this and ran to Donald Ramotar who in turn gave it to Nadir?

I heard Manzoor plans to take back the leadership of the TUF from his daughter.

He is not being selected by the PPP to be in parlaiment.

Why you bringing up Manzoor.  Is what this man do you or your family?

I heard Manzoor used to get his light bill paid by the State, so what Happening now?

being relevant.

An audit of Mazoor light bill should be done and he should be surcharged for all back bills when he was not a Minister.