July 17 2019
Dear Editor,
According to the authorities on the matter, and I’ll quote the Canadian one here, “Caretaker governments may be put in place when a government in a parliamentary system is defeated in a motion of no confidence, or in the case when the house [Parliament] to which the government is responsible is dissolved, such governments should be in place for an interim period until an election is held and a new government is formed. In this sense, in some countries which use a Westminster system of government, the caretaker government is simply the incumbent government, which continues to operate in the interim period between the normal dissolution of parliament for the purpose of holding an election and the formation of a new government after the election results are known. Unlike in ordinary times, the caretaker government’s activities are limited by custom and convention. Uniformly they adhere to the code of not making decisions in government which are not for the purpose of the daily running of the state apparatus.”
Of course, as I have been saying in these letters, our permanent secretaries are the ones who should be doing that.
And to make my point again, I am going to have to get a little brutal now; again, it’s just an example, but one which I know of personally which is why I am using it. In September 1992 Mr. Harripersaud Nokta was at the gate of the Houston Estate on Friday afternoons selling the Mirror Newspaper to the workers who we were paying to grow sugar cane. The next month in October 1992, Nokta was the Minister in charge of Works and Trans-port, running it and making executive decisions!
In this country, after the Burnham regime, the public service was subverted to be a political rather than a professionally state-run organisation, since at that time the party was paramount to the state. So Nokta did not create this nonsense, he was just caught up in it, just as Dr. Jagan was. The problem was that they were in opposition for 28 years and so had no idea of what they had to do and that uncertainty went on for a very long time – years in fact.
Unlike some writers, as a former chairman of the Economics Services Committee of the Guyana Parliament, I believe that the objective of a budget is to charter the course of a country and commit funds therefore by what is fundamentally a document which contains the philosophy of the thinking of the government at the time of its presentation. Clearly, such an action cannot possibly be regarded as routine caretaking.
One also has to remember that the main ruling of the CCJ is that the government fell since December 2019 [ Should be 2018 ] – on the day that the no-confidence motion was passed.
Editor, in a Parliamentary Westminster system such as ours, to keep the separation of power between the Executive and the Legislative branch is not easy, and it is a construct which has to be understood by all Guyanese.
In America, the President begins his term several months after an election, because he is bringing with him a completely new set of Secretaries or we as know them, Ministers, to head the various departments of government; the secretaries of Defence, of State, of the Treasury, of Agriculture etc.
These people are not chosen for their political accomplishments and activism but rather, for their outstanding professional performances in their respective fields of endeavour.
They are not and usually have never been, senators or political functionaries of any kind. So to keep the separation of powers in the USA is very easy, since the heads of the government departments are not political appointees and are completely separate from the senate and the congress and are not members thereof. Mind you, the citizens of the US are kept informed by the media at all times who are on the lookout for any one of the three branches of the government trying to influence the other.
In our Westminster system, the Ministers who will become the Executive branch of government, except the President, must be Members of Parliament. They have to be members of the legislative branch and continue to be members of the legislative branch of government before they can become the members of the executive branch of government. Therefore, they continue at all times to be both members of the legislature, as well as members of the executive branch of government, i.e. the Ministers and the Cabinet of the nation.
In many countries with our system, this blurs the line between the legislative and the executive arms of government. However, in our winner-takes-all system, I can very easily say that as we see it in operation daily, this division between the legislative arm and the executive arm does not exist at all, and for us it has been a recipe for disaster since they have put measures in place to exert control over the judicial arm of government.
So, if this construct is legal, if there is no parliament, how can there be Ministers? But the law abhors a vacuum, and so the law or the judiciary likes to see something, and sometimes anything, instead of nothing.
So the CCJ has told us to let the government now in power function as a caretaker government. We don’t know exactly what the CCJ judges’ view of a caretaker Government is, but we do not need to know as there are numerous examples of what caretaker conventions and practices are from numerous countries around the world (Canada, Australia and India are good examples)) to guide us.
That view is – don’t do anything new and just keep what has been the policies of the government prior to the no-confidence motion ticking over, until a new government is elected.
If there can be consultations between the government and the opposition as to what exactly are the Guyana conventions of a caretaker, so much the better. Running back to the CCJ is just another example of what has become usual practice in this country, an act of utter stupidity.
Systems which are as politically corrupt as ours have become unworkable, owing to the misunderstanding of the successive governments we have had since independence, and I don’t mean corrupt in terms of being dishonest.
I mean corrupt in terms of the way it has evolved over time, giving far too many powers to the Ministers who are not well prepared to manage anything, and not enough power to the real accounting officers of the Ministries, the Permanent Secretaries. It is clear that the situation has become a morass of corruption and stupidity.
Our failure or lack of oversight as a nation exacerbates the situation considerably, but we allowed it, we the citizens of this country allowed it and we have to take back control of it! This is our country, we own it, all of us, not Mr. Granger or Mr. Jagdeo, and therefore they must do what we want and not the other way around.
The nation is haemorrhaging with the sort of unbridled skullduggery we see unfolding in the media daily, and so I want to salute the Stabroek and Kaieteur News especially, for keeping it in our face daily, to force us to do something.
Editor, we must always remember that evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
On behalf of all Guyanese I thank you
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
