A MAJORITY OF ONE

Mar 11, 2012 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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It is not the job of plenipotentiaries or the representatives of the opposition parties to be writing to ministers of the government requesting to know when these ministers will meet with them.
These representatives should not be writing letters to any minister complaining about not being able to meet with the minister for consultations on the country’s Budget. They should inform their leaders of whatever problems they are having and have the problem resolved at the level of the leaders.
By now, however, the leaders of opposition parties should be in little doubt as to where the government stands in relation to the Budget. The government is not interested in help in preparing the Budget.
The government is not interested in sitting down with the opposition and drafting a joint Budget. The government knows what it wants in the Budget and it is for the opposition to stop seeking to be part of a process which the government views as solely the responsibility of the executive.
The opposition has clearly not been listening to the government. The opposition is whining about its non- involvement in the preparation of the Budget. But from day one – after the opposition opted to play hard-card with the government – the government made it clear that the responsibility for the preparation of the Budget was that of the executive and the executive alone.
And the government is perfectly in order. The opposition parties and some of their mouthpieces seem at times to act as if we are operating under an American-styled system whereby there is a clear-cut separation between the executive and the legislature.
We do not have such a system in which financial bills are often the product of political compromise. Guyana fundamentally has a Westminster system in which the executive is responsible for the tabling of bills and the legislature for the passage of such bills.
The opposition therefore is not going to be involved in the preparation of the Budget. And they should not. It is not their job.
They have a majority of one and should not let this get to their heads and force them to behave as if they are the government or have a right to participation in executive decisions.
The government should be allowed to table its Budget. It should show what it has in mind and what it plans to do over the next year.
The role of the opposition is after listening to what the government proposes to sit down and say, “ We hear you. But we believe that so and so needs to change and we would like to see this also done.” In short, they have to negotiate – not dictate with their majority of one – with the government.
No plenipotentiary therefore should be complaining in public about not being able to meet with the Minister of Finance. Even if there was a willingness of the minister to meet with the representatives, the actions of the parliamentary opposition in frustrating the passage of supplementary financial bills would have left a bitter taste in the mouth of the government which is not likely to be in the mood to be engaged in any joint preparation of the Budget.
The opposition was wrong to have rejected the supplementary bills on the grounds on which they were rejected. Budgeting can never be an exact art. It has never been so, and this is why provisions are made not just for spending due to unforeseen circumstances, but also for cases where the initial amounts appropriated may have been insufficient.
It is well known that often when the Budget is prepared, many agencies may not have a full idea of their actual financial requirements, and their financial needs could end up being higher or lower than initially thought. This is why the amounts allocated are usually referred to as estimates.
While, therefore, as far as possible, the government should ensure that its appropriations approximate to its financial needs, this is hardly ever totally possible, and there will always be variations. Not all these variations, as the PNC knows from its own experience, will be due to unforeseen circumstances.
Priorities may change; an international agreement may have been signed, for example, that would entail some spending by the government. The fact is that there is nothing inherently wrong with supplementary provisions, and taking such an approach to these provisions is lop-sided, as is rejecting supplementary provisions on the grounds that the spending should have been predicted. This is ridiculous.
The only grounds for the rejection of a supplementary provision which was drawn from the contingency fund should be that it was not wasteful, unnecessary or unlawful.
It is disingenuous and ridiculous for the opposition to be rejecting supplementary provisions on the grounds that the spending should have been foreseen. By this criterion, all of the supplementary bills passed under the PNC, should have been disqualified.
The opposition has to get its act together. It does not seem to know what it is doing. It should take some time to understand financial issues because when the Budget is tabled, the people of Guyana are not going to accept the rejection of this Budget simply on the basis that the opposition had no say in it. That too would be outrageous.

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