Bizarre things taking place inside the PPP

Nov 10, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There are things happening in Guyana that make politics a mysterious process that human beings may never be able to comprehend. Let us start with the election of the winning party.

The victorious party in the last national election was the PPP. It provided the money for the campaign. It sent its forces in the fields to work day and night to convert voters. It paid citizens to work in the election campaign. After success, many of these workers became Parliamentarians and the party formed the Government of Guyana.

By what logic then, can a ruling party be totally locked out of the policy-making process? Who makes policies for the nation? Worldwide, it is the ruling party. Those policies come from two sources – the election manifesto which is expected to be implemented after victory and from the statutory meetings of the leadership of the ruling party.

The Ministers of Government may have an idea of their own but if that thought conflicts with the essential beliefs of the governing organization, then it cannot be made into law. For example, the Minister of Education may feel that all types of education should be made free. But he/she cannot declare that on his/her own.

What will happen is that the ruling party will meet at its statutory meetings and decide if the treasury could afford free education. If the decision is that it cannot, the Minister cannot implement his idea.

Bizarre things are happening inside the PPP that should make all, I repeat, all PPP voters over the last fifteen years ask questions of their leaders when they begin to campaign for the forthcoming elections. Who is in charge of the Government of Guyana? Legally, it is the Cabinet, with ultimate constitutional power residing in the President.

But this is not the way the world works. The best example to use is Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. One is the Speaker of the House, the other the President. The Speaker has no legal control over the Government. The President needs congressional votes if he is going to get his dreams passed into legislation. So he has to talk to Ms. Pelosi and bargain with her because the President alone is not the Democratic Party.

In Guyana, the President is not the PPP but we have been hearing for the past four years how helpless the PPP is to stop him from pursuing courses that, the PPP as a party with a conceptualization of what Guyana should be like, is not in agreement with.

We don’t need to provide countless examples of the rumoured one-man show in Guyana. (Rickey Singh gave one in his column in the Chronicle and that was the only article in his seventeen years of writing for the Chronicle on Guyanese politics that was critical of the Government.)

One case should interest us – NCN’s refusal to broadcast an interview with GAWU leaders. GAWU is vehemently claiming that the tape is not being aired because of mischief from above.

Enter the world of the macabre. The head of GAWU has been inside the Central Committee and Executive Committee of the PPP for more than thirty years. He is part of the policy-making machinery of the PPP that forms the Government of Guyana. Why then can’t the ruling party, through the Minister of Information, tell the NCN management that the policy of the ruling party which was arrived after deliberation is for NCN to offer GAWU’s side of the current dispute with GuySuCo?

Well alright, the man with legal powers, the President, can direct NCN not to air the GAWU programme. The NCN management has to listen to the President and not the PPP because the President has legal power over the public sector and para-statal organizations.

The question is that if the PPP, as the ruling party, cannot get NCN to do a professional job and give the views of both sides in the sugar industry a hearing, then what does the concept, “ruling party” mean. The operative word is “ruling.”

Who or what does it rule over after it wins an election? What is its role in the general scheme of policy-making? More importantly, and this is where the voters come in, why should a cadre work tirelessly to bring his/her party into government and it has no power over the very people that it chose to make into the President and the Ministers?

The PPP voters should ask themselves whether if they vote for their party in 2011 and it wins, who has actually won – the party itself or the man/woman that the party chose as its presidential candidate?

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Bizarre things taking place inside the PPP

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