THE DISCREDITING OF A MINORITY GOVT.

Feb 05, 2013 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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All executive authority is vested in the President of Guyana. His Ministers are merely his assistants and his advisers.
Some of these Ministers may feel otherwise; some of them may even feel that they can act independent of the President but they do at their own peril because constitutionally Ministers derive whatever authority they have by virtue of the executive authority which is vested in the President.
Apart from the quota of technocratic Ministers that the President is allowed to appoint, he is required to appoint Ministers from amongst persons who are elected members of the National Assembly or from persons who are qualified to be elected as such members.
It is therefore possible for the President to include in his Cabinet persons drawn from the opposition political parties. The Constitution does not forbid this; but neither does it demand it.
As such there is no moral or constitutional compulsion for the President to include opposition parliamentarians or persons so eligible to be opposition parliamentarians in his Cabinet.
It is his call as to whether he will limit his ministerial appointments to persons from the ruling party and the allowable number of technocratic appointees.
The President is also not morally or constitutionally required to elect a Cabinet that enjoys majority support of the National Assembly. There is no provision in the constitution or principle or convention of constitutionalism that dictates that the government must enjoy majority support in the National Assembly.
If this were the case it would mean that no confidence motions would not be necessary because the government would always have the support of the National Assembly. We know this is not always the case regardless of the electoral system operation.
Proportional representation was never intended to ensure that a government emerges that enjoys the majority support of the National Assembly.
When the PNC in the sixties was being consistently defeated at the polls under the first-past-the-post electoral system, it was the one that advocated for PR saying that this system would ensure that the parliament better reflects the will of the people.
Now that PR has failed to grant to the PNCR its majority, we should avoid confusing the nature of the electoral system with desirable objectives of those who contest under such a system.
We should avoid entertaining the notion that governments should be so constituted as to be able to command majority support in the National Assembly.
Such arguments fall into a pattern of the PNC when it loses an election always calling for a change of rules.
It is well known that elections held under PR are prone to situations in which no single party commands the majority of seats in the National Assembly and thus often leads to coalition governments.
Unfortunately, the constitution of Guyana allows the party that wins the most votes (regardless of whether it is a majority) to secure the Presidency and thus the right to form the government. That has always been the case since 1980. It did not change with the constitutional reform process that followed the 1997 elections.
There is nothing unusual, in Westminster systems, about a government not commanding the majority support of the National Assembly. The Executive must be distinguished from the legislature. Despite the government not commanding majority support in the National Assembly it remains legitimate.
The lack of majority support does not de-legitimize the government; it may make its work however more difficult as our recent experience in Guyana demonstrates so capably.
It sounds politically attractive to advance the view that there should be a government that enjoys the majority support of the National Assembly. But the absence of such a situation also opens up a number of possibilities, including the necessity of compromise and negotiations between the opposition and the government.
It encourages a form of negotiated governance which ought not to be discomforting or uncomfortable to those who have long been advocating a system of shared governance.
In fact, the present dispensation in the National Assembly provides a useful litmus test as to the sincerity of those in the opposition who have long been plugging shared governance even to the extent of saying that if they won the elections they would share power with the PPP.
Instead, however, of setting the stage for political cooperation and compromise, what has ensured has been political confrontation. Actions have been taken that have inflamed political antagonisms and created an unhealthy environment both outside and inside the National Assembly.
What we have is not a yielding of political turf but a situation in which the opposition has clearly signaled that it intends to dominate the parliament. With such a confrontational attitude, there is little hope that outside of the provisions of the Constitution that dictate consultations/agreement between the government and the opposition as regards certain appointments, that the government would be willing to also yield any ground when it comes to national policy.
What will ensure will be political stalemate that will only be broken to avoid a “fiscal cliff”. There is little hope that the opposition will change its attitude in parliament. The people of Guyana must therefore appreciate that this is what can happen in minority governments, especially when you have the type of opposition that we have.
Such outcomes as we are witnessing in our parliament may not always be the rule of minority governments; but it is also certainly not the exception.

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