No Govt. and opposition should be allowed to deny voters their constitutional right for 16 yrs

Apr 12, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,

According to Pandit Chrishna Persaud’s letter captioned, “Mervin’s points are at best speculative and at worst illogical,” (Kaieteur News, April 11), many of the points documented in my letter (“Did GECOM jump the gun and say it was ready for local govt. polls?” SN, March 26), are not only devoid of commonsense, but are speculative at best and illogical at worst. Yet he proceeded to respond with an elaborate nine-point attempt aimed at rebutting or clarifying my nonsense. I am still glad he could have picked sense from my apparent nonsense to help make his own sense!

The obvious personal axe-grinding aside, I am sticking to my opinion that GECOM, as a supposedly independent entity set up to serve the people of Guyana, should have taken the government and all parliamentary political parties (mainly the PNC) to court to help expedite local government legislative reforms. After all, the decision to postpone Local Government Elections was taken by the government and the opposition PNC (during the inter-party dialogues) with the aim of reforming the process, and since elections are a constitutional right, no government and opposition should be allowed to deny voters their constitutional right for 16 years. Not even if they used Parliament to this end!

That is the travesty that Pandit Persaud completely missed or ignored in his haste to defend GECOM, which he rightly or wrongly believes should have been represented on the Joint Task Force for Local Government Reforms. However, he did ask a very salient question: what would be GECOM’s locus standi to take the government and opposition to court and under what legislation this could have been done? One definition of locus standi reads: ‘the right to bring an action, to be heard in Court, or to address the Court on a matter before it. Locus standi is the ability of a party to demonstrate to the court sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party’s participation in the case.

For example, in the United States, a person cannot bring a suit challenging the constitutionality of a law unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that the plaintiff is (or will be) harmed by the law. Otherwise, the court will rule that the plaintiff “lacks standing” to bring the suit, and will dismiss the case without considering the merits of the claim of unconstitutionality.

In order to sue to have a court declare a law unconstitutional, there must be a valid reason for whoever is suing to be there. The party suing must have something to lose in order to sue unless they have automatic standing by action of law.

In Guyana, the people have been harmed by the law governing the Local Government reform process! There has been a 16-year drought in Local Government Elections all because the government and the PNC, in the name of engaging in legislative reforms of the Local Government system and usurping their parliamentary powers to this end, have delayed, hence denied, the people of the Guyana their constitutional right to elect their local government leaders to govern over their local affairs.

This has brought much harm to the people, but especially residents of Georgetown, the nation’s capital, where an unhealthy environment became reflective of unhealthy politicking between the PPP Government and the PNC. The government owes the M&CC and the M&CC owes the government. This reeks of selfish politics! And GECOM, charged with administering elections, has been a facilitator by not seeking relief from the court on behalf of the people.

Anyone in Guyana can sue the executive and legislative branches of government if they feel the two have harmed them by denying them their constitutional rights.

And since the Court (as the judicial branch) remains the people’s last hope when the executive and legislative branches are denying them their constitutional rights, then let the Court decide whether GECOM has a case and, in the process, let the people know that GECOM, as an independent entity serving their interests, tried to end the long-running political denial by the government and the PNC of their right to Local Government Elections.

So even though, as Pandit Persaud wrote, “there is concurrence among the political parties in Parliament and the government that one more attempt would be made to bring the outstanding reforms to closure”, the fact of the matter is, the executive and legislative branches are not powers unto themselves when dealing with the people’s business; the checks and balances system allows for the people to seek redress through the judicial branch when the other two branches are violating the people’s rights, which is what the government and the PNC have done. (The AFC became enjoined after 2006).

The other problem is that the people just don’t seem to know their rights via the judicial branch! I doubt whether people in other developed and responsible democracies would allow for the delay of local/municipal elections lasting 16 years, so why should Guyanese who are eager to take advantage of the democratic process, be made to wait indefinitely?

Before I close, let me thank Pandit Persaud for referring me to Section 35 (1) of the Local Authorities (Elections) Act, Chapter 28:03, which “clearly empowers the Minister of Local Government to appoint a day for the holding of local government elections”.

This revelation is the proof I sought in an effort to determine how truly independent GECOM is following the amendment that passed responsibility for administering the affairs of elections from the Local Government Minister to GECOM. Now that the proof is established let me say that GECOM is not as independent as I thought; it is actually a political rubber stamp!

All of the noise made about amending the Local Government Act to let GECOM administer elections is just that: noise to distract and deceive! I will repeat what I originally wrote: “leaving the date setting to the Minister could be a political disaster for GECOM, because the Minister can then delay the date until such a time the ruling party and its government are satisfied they are capable of pulling off a sweep.”

Why would the PPP and its government give GECOM the power to administer elections, but retain the power to set the date of elections? The same sort of thinking was at work when the Constitution was amended in 1999 and the PPP Government retained the clauses protecting the President from criminal indictments and lawsuits. They must have the last say!

Even if everything else I said in my previous letter amounted to a mole hill of nonsense to Pandit Persaud, I still want to see if he can at least pick a little bit of sense from my foregoing nonsense here.

And even if he can’t see it, then I am sure others will see it and conclude that, at the end of the day when GECOM says it is ready for elections, the actual date for the event is left up to the government.

Ergo, elections are designed, developed and delivered by GECOM, but their staging date is ultimately dependent on the government’s decision. Government, not GECOM, has the last say!

I respect Pandit Persaud’s right as ‘a spectator to the political processes in Guyana’, whose ‘only one contribution (is) to bring about political change by voting for the party of my choice’, but he is not the only one who aspires to do so with an open-minded approach. And like him, I will never seek to give the impression that I am on the moral ‘high ground’ purporting to promote the best for my country, while my public pronouncements reek of double standards.

That is why I said GECOM should take government and the opposition to court; the opposition was not spared, so there is no double standard!

At the end of the day, the government is responsible for ensuring everything is in place for the people to exercise their franchise, and the government failed for 16 years in this area.

Emile Mervin

 

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