December 16 ,2020
Guyana is supposed to be a parliamentary democracy. Since the introduction of a presidential system in 1980, however, power has become concentrated in the hands of the head of state, and every president from Burnham onwards has made no moves to mitigate that. It is true that ultimately restricting presidential power will depend on constitutional reform for which neither of the two major parties has hitherto shown any appetite, but the various presidents themselves by their actions tended to reinforce the popular perception that they were maximum leaders, independent of what went on in Parliament.
The president, of course, does not sit in Parliament, and so he is not directly answerable to it. Government business there is conducted on his behalf by the prime minister, whose ambit for independent thought, never mind action, is inevitably severely circumscribed.
As for the conduct of the National Assembly, other than on occasions such as when the budget is being examined and the public actually learns something about what the government intends to do (or has done), debates are very formulaic. Members read their speeches, usually spending their time referring to the deficiencies of the opposing side when it was in office. As a consequence, the exchanges are normally far from compelling, even if a wittier than usual heckle succeeds in puncturing the monotony once in a while. There have been in the past a few members who lifted the quality of the discussion periodically, but there seems to be a dearth of those individuals now.
It was the introduction of parliamentary committees which marked an important step towards making Parliament more meaningful. There are different kinds of these, including standing and sectoral committees as well as select and special select committees. Of the first named two of the more important are the Constitutional Reform Committee and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the latter of which among other things audits the accounts submitted by the Auditor General. The four sectoral committees cover Natural Resources, Economic Services, Foreign Relations and Social Services, and these can require ministers and others to testify before them, as well as exercise considerable authority in other respects. Under the Constitution their function is “to determine whether the execution of Government policy is in consonance with the principles of good governance and in the best interest of all the people of Guyana.”
The performance of the standing and particularly the sectoral committees has not been without criticism, with the reports submitted by the latter said to vary in quality. While there are clearly problems which need to be addressed, for the sake of our democracy it is critical that these committees be made operational. The National Assembly has not met since September, a dereliction for which the government has yet to give credible account, but it is the Speaker of the House, Mr Manzoor Nadir, at whose door the failure to convene the various parliamentary committees can be laid.
There are fourteen committees, and after the Committee of Selection met on September 15 this year, all of them have now been fully constituted. So why the lack of activation? The issue with the PAC is particularly pressing, since last week the Auditor General handed over his report for the fiscal year 2019 at Parliament, and the committee last met on August 6, 2018 and is three-and-a-half years behind in its examination of the public accounts. Procrastination, therefore, does not seem the recommended way to proceed.
Speaker Nadir said recently that his office was “working hard” to convene the first meetings of the committees, but there had been a delay because they were facing “some challenges”. Priority was being placed on having all members present, he said, and one of the challenges would be logistics. He told reporters that a number of mechanisms were being explored like having virtual meetings which would allow members to participate from their homes. “…you want to be able to get people from far-flung places like Paruima and Shulinab,” he explained, so with virtual meetings they won’t have to come “every other week to a particular location.”
Well all of this on the face of it sounds very reasonable, except that the members of most of the committees don’t come from “far-flung” places. Committees which comprise members who do not have to travel any great distance could be located in a setting where social distancing could easily be observed. After all, the numbers involved are very small. Even if the preference was for virtual meetings, most of those living on the coast are probably in a position to oblige in that regard. Exactly how many members of the PAC, for instance, live in Shulinab or Paruima? The Speaker knows very well there are none, and that there will only be one or two at the most who originate from there across the fourteen committees.
But that is not all. Mr Nadir was quoted as saying: “We are still looking at arrangements for convening the first meeting not only of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) but all the other committees that were appointed.” The only response to this is, what on earth for? Where is the logic in convening all the committees at the same time? If some, like the PAC, are ready now, then activate them. Even the Speaker must know that some committees are more critical than others. Is this a case of bureaucracy taking precedence over democracy?
It should be noted too that this appears to be a more recent thought on the part of the Speaker, since when asked about the delay the week before last he cited “scheduling conflicts” as the explanation. We reported that at least one member of the PAC from each side of the House told this newspaper that they had not been contacted by Parliament, so what was the true nature of these scheduling conflicts?
Mr David Patterson of the AFC, who has been designated to chair the PAC, has said that the Standing Orders prescribe that the Speaker convene the first meeting of each committee so that a chairperson can be elected from among its members. And if he is not available to do this, then he can nominate either the Deputy Speaker or another MP to act on his behalf. He was reported as saying too that meetings could be scheduled even if government members were absent, since three members constituted a quorum, and the opposition had four members. The Chairman has to come from the opposition, “thus”, he said, “the attendance of the government members, while desirable, is not necessary.”
He was also reported as saying that the first meeting would in all likelihood be very brief.
As for the Speaker, he had said earlier that the meetings remained a “top priority for his office.” Mr Nadir’s problem is that no one is persuaded. With the kinds of specious rationalisations he has been offering the public, he has only succeeded in igniting probably unnecessary suspicions that the government might be harbouring some undeclared motive for the delay.
There is very little structural room for inclusiveness in our system, and one of the few places where there is a small measure of elasticity in that regard, is in our parliamentary committees. Apart from the fact that a committee such as the PAC is chaired by the opposition and not by the government, these small units allow for real exchanges between the members, as opposed to the kind of trumpeting which goes on across the aisles in the parliament chamber. Potentially, they allow more room for looking at an issue with the same eyes.
In our present circumstances, the committees need to be supported, enhanced and developed; they have become a critical element in our parliamentary arrangements, and there is no excuse for not convening them. Even inadvertently, we should not be trying to close what the Caracas Chronicles calls the space between democracy and autocracy.