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Not only self-destructive but comical and asinine
Oct 26, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Is it the money they want? It has to be the money. Why then are they in Parliament. The opposition I mean? Here is opposition asininity on display for you. In the space of four days, one opposition member from the PNC, Ms. Clarrisa Riehl referred to Guyana as a police state then contradictorily praised the Government for bringing positive legislation in Parliament when she supported the Judicial Review Bill.
Someone has to offer Ms. Riehl a course in political theory. A country cannot be a police state and by an impossible dialectical leap, at the same time, pass democratic legislation in Parliament.
If Ms. Riehl is going to go back to school then it is advisable that she takes along with her Ms. Sheila Holder from another opposition party, the AFC. Ms. Holder, in an interview with the Stabroek News, took GECOM to task when its Chairman, Dr. Steve Surujbally, told the media that the budgetary control the Government exercises over GECOM began in Parliament and Parliament has to rectify it.
Ms. Holder called Dr Surujbally’s observation a “cop out.” Here are her words; “The government which has a majority (in Parliament), is not in favour of allowing institutions to operate independently …the government refuses to devise a mechanism to allow them to operate independent of the executive.”
These are the judgement of an opposition Member of Parliament on the nature of power in Guyana but it does not deter her from constantly voting with the PPP Parliamentarians, even approving Government’s nominees to the Parliamentary Appointments Committee and voting against nominations from her opposition colleagues in the PNC.
Mr. Basil Williams is the surprise package here. Just one day before he went into the National Assembly and showered praise on the government’s deceptive and deceiving Judicial Review Bill, we had a long, long chat outside one of the Magistrate Courts on his mammoth service to the PNC.
Mr. Williams and I go back a long time; we were contemporaries at UG in our student days. For a learned lawyer and one of the enduring servants of the PNC, and a politician who no doubt understands the characteristics of fascism in the PPP’s exercise of power, it amazes me how he could find himself praising the ruling parry for bringing to the National Assembly the Judicial Review Bill the contents of which the Government has no intention of adhering to.
Mention should be made that Mr. Khemraj Ramjatan was also in a eulogistic mood about the Bill.
How can a country’s citizens take its parliamentary opposition seriously when it speaks with a forked tongue? You are telling the nation that the Government will not allow constitutionally independent state institutions to function with respect and integrity and that this very government has created a police state yet in the same breath this dictatorial regime is given excellent marks for good governance in terms of the types of legislation it introduces in Parliament.
Go to the PNC and AFC’s Sunday columns in the Kaieteur News and the descriptions of the abuse of power by the PPP regime are sweeping and extensive. Readers and citizens are supposed to be moved by these interpretations but no doubt a gush of the hilarity overtakes society as they watch the opposition parties take their seats in Parliament and participate as if Guyana is a practicing democracy. This is asininity beyond belief.
Minus the WPA, these are the very politicians who have compiled a dossier on horrendous murders involving extra-judicial marauders who had overlapping relationship with leading members of the political elites and have asked the Caricom Secretariat and ABC countries to act on the accusations contained therein.
These people probably laugh behind their backs. They probably said to themselves; “Why don’t they get the dossier to be adopted for debate in Parliament; since Guyana is a democracy why come to us.”
I will refer the Guyanese people back to this column if we are going to have a general election next year. In the PPP manifesto, they are going to put in all those wonderful quotes from the opposition parties about the good legislation the PPP has passed in Parliament. The PPP is going to tell the citizens that these are the very people who condemn the Government as an undemocratic one but look at the nice things they themselves have written and spoken about the PPP Government.
What a tragic nation. We have a terribly bad government and a parliamentary opposition that is fit to be in the Russian circus in an unlivable Russian winter.
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