Mr. Speakaah! I beg to diffah!

Feb 08, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Today is Parliament. The ruling party that has been in power for seventeen years will present its 2010 budget. It has been compiled without consultations and this has been the pattern over the years. And if there were, it would be of the biological type – “We spoke to you, therefore we consulted you.” Before we proceed with the points of this essay, a reminder of what President Jagdeo said. He styled Guyana as the best country in the world in the context of the extent to which the Guyana Government went to consult the population on LCDS. Strangely, such a “wonderfully democratic government” doesn’t consult the citizenry on the budget, the nature of which concerns every citizen.
So today the Parliamentarians that belong to the “most democratic government in the world” will don their pin stripe suits and enter Parliament where they will do what they have been doing for seventeen years – use Parliament as if it is part of the Executive, a process that a Commonwealth consultant has come to Guyana study and has recommended the immediate reclamation of Parliament’s independence. The show will not focus so much on the pin-stripe Pavlovian creatures from the ruling party but from the Opposition Benches.
Today, few Guyanese would want to tell you about their faith in the parties in Parliament that sit on the opposition benches. They don’t have any. This is the most servile opposition in the Caricom region. Any Caricom Government that has chalked up the ocean of immoralities, perversities and venalities that the Guyana Government has to date would have met with an implacable inflexible and tempestuous rejection mood of the opposition. Today, this sheepish opposition will take their cozy seats in a Parliament where more Members Days were offered by the Burnham Government to the PPP parliamentarians in his sixteen years of domination than in the seventeen year old hegemonic control of the PPP.
Today, the oppositions MPs led by their respective leaders will sit and listen to representatives of a government that has lost all decency, all moral qualities and appear as nothing but evil in the eyes of the resigned population over which it governs. To these opposition MPs, nothing unusual, abnormal, degenerate has occurred in the land to warrant an implacable rejection mood; it should be business as usual. So, like the ruling elites, they too will don their pin stripe attire and eagerly show their hands to the Speaker to make their point. In the meantime, outside, the contempt for both Opposition and Government grows but there is no one to come to the rescue of a helpless nation.
You can anticipate what will happen today in the House. One of the MPs, perhaps one of the leaders, maybe, Corbin or Trotman will move a motion to suspend the Budget presentation to discuss as a matter of urgency, the mini-riot in the Camp Street jail. The Speaker will rule against them and it will be business as usual. Such an Opposition wants you to vote for them. However evil the PPP regime appears in the eyes of the Guyanese people, when the PPP was on the other side of the House from 1968 – 1992, it offered a mutinous reaction to the violations of the Burnham Government. Cheddi Jagan was fond of boycotting Parliament whenever he felt Burnham wasn’t listening.
We have an opposition that fails to see that their lack of resolve has encouraged a diabolical political cabal to take latitudes and engage in excesses never before seen in the English-speaking Caribbean. And each time this opposition steps into Parliament, it encourage the regime to take greater latitudes and expand the range of excesses. So what happens after Monday? Will there be a modification of autocratic rule? Will the oligarchic elites investigate Dr. Ramsammy; hold an inquiry into Roger Khan’s activities; sanction Kwame Mc Koy; restore subsidies to Critchlow Labour College; stop demolishing what they call encumbrances that are totally unnecessary; tell the nation who the contractors are that will be installing the unnecessary fibre optic cable bought from Brazil; announce the offer of permits to set up private radio stations; announce the eventual coming into being of the Procurement Commission and the Human Rights Commission?
Sadly and tragically, none of these, not one of these necessities will be implemented. What is going to happen after Monday, is that a humiliated opposition will crawl back in the House on Tuesday to debate the Budget and see themselves on television yelling out; “Mr. Speakaah! Mr. Speakaah!  Can I be heard?” And of course, elected dictatorship will march on.

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