THE CONDITIONS DO NOT EXIST FOR POWER SHARING

August 8, 2013, By KNews, Filed Under Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source

The issue of power-sharing does not arise at the moment in Guyana. The opposition parties are not interested in power sharing; they want power, desperately.

And they are using their one seat majority in the National Assembly to hijack the role of government. Not only have they arrogated to themselves the right to cut the Budget; not only also have they assumed control of key parliamentary committees, but they have blatantly encroached on the jurisdiction of the government to set policy by passing Bills without the consent of the Executive.

Their latest foray has been to dilute the numerical representation of the government on the Local Government Commission. This cannot be allowed to pass muster. No self- respecting government is ever going to allow a situation whereby it ends up being a minority in a Local Government Commission. This can effectively mean that organs which are said to exercise “delegated” authority are actually being made autonomous both administratively and politically.

There is nothing wrong with Local Government organs enjoying administrative autonomy, but this must be balanced with these organs being subject to government policy. Otherwise these bodies can pursue policies that are not the intention of the government. In other words, these bodies can become a parallel government.

The government should not allow itself to be assigned a minority number of nominees on the Local Government Commission. The government must put a stop, once and for all, to this maneuver.

They must also begin to tighten the screws on the Opposition so as to bring them to their senses and make them understand the nature of the political system under which they operate and the norms and traditions that govern this system.

Until such time as greater respect is shown for the role of government, as defined by these norms and traditions, the government should not give in to any demands by the Opposition parties. The government should stand their ground and not yield.

Standing firm must not be construed as an unwillingness of the government to share power. There is already a great deal of sharing of power within the existing system. The present Local Government system allows for the Opposition to share in local administration. In several Regions, there are Opposition controlled councils with responsibility for administering Local Government policies set by the government.

This is a form of power sharing but it seems as if the Opposition is no longer content with being part of administering government policy. By relegating the government to minority representation on the proposed Local Government Commission, the Opposition is on course to now take over the entire management of Local Government affairs.

They already have the government hamstrung by the Budget cuts, something that is now being challenged before the Courts. And as we know, they were attempting to dictate who the President should have as his Minister of Home Affairs.

This is an Opposition that has to be tamed of its wild instincts. The government is within its right to resist the actions of the Opposition. No self respecting government is going to allow an Opposition to act as it did in Parliament recently when it tried to determine when the government should bring a matter before the House.

Such a determination has always been the prerogative of the government and it was downright presumptuous and barefaced for the Opposition to move a motion to rearrange the Order Paper and thus decide when the government should bring a Bill before the House. The government did the right thing by remaining silent throughout the ensuing debate.

That sort of attitude by the Opposition does not lend towards the conditions that would be necessary for political cooperation. How can there be any thought about power sharing when the Opposition is behaving in such a presumptuous manner? And why, given this attitude of the Opposition, should the government want to share power?

But the government may well have another reason for not wanting to share power. The government may be of the view that it was robbed of a majority in the National Assembly and that once new elections are held it should be easily able to return to its majority.

It was recently revealed by a Commissioner of GECOM, that one month after the election, an officer went in and reported that seven pages of results were not tabulated in a Region that the PPP won comfortably.

These seven pages that were left out involved nineteen polling stations and it needs to be asked how did the IT Department miss this development in the tabulation of the results? In fact how did all the observers, including the EAB miss this? How in the first place can nineteen polling stations be left out of the tabulation of a Division? Was this really an oversight or was it a conspiracy against the PPPC? There must be an investigation into this matter.

If the PPPC feels that it was robbed of a majority because of the non-inclusion of these nineteen polling stations, if in facts it knows that had the votes for these nineteen polling been included in the result it would have emerged not just with a one seat majority but possibly a two-seat lead, then why would the PPPC want to share power?