Into the lap of the Government

Sep 03, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The rejection by the British Parliament of the Prime Minister’s decision to bomb Syria followed by the position of President Obama to let Congress debate the bombing issue before he makes his decision have put the ruling party and the President of Guyana in a quandary. It is like a rotten mango that has dropped into their lap.
What these two pieces of international news have done is to demonstrate to the world the basic fulcrum on which democracy rests – the separation of power. The Prime Minister of the UK will not survive in power if he ignores the choice the Parliament made and go ahead and bomb Syria. It is certain as night follows day that he will lose his office.
If he does lose his power, then read the newspapers the next day and the consensus among politicians, commentators, academics and the ordinary folks would be that he ignored the representatives that the people of the UK elected to make decisions for the nation.
One assumes, based on these two developments, that both APNU and the AFC may invest themselves with new energy to confront the government on what is becoming a gigantic paradox in Guyana – a farce and a danger. Farce in the sense that the 2011 election victory for the Opposition has literally and virtually been reduced to nothing, meaning that the majority votes did not matter in how the country was to be administered.
Danger in the sense, as aptly put by Opposition Leader Granger, the Opposition cannot go on to accept this for the remaining three years of the PPP Government. The danger is what we must emphasize. There cannot be a citizen in this country that can be so barefaced or so naïve to think that the two Opposition parties will continue to spend countless hours in the House making laws, using the committee systems to change old conventions in State institutions and it is all wasted. There must come a breaking point. It is unrealistic to think that any opposition that controls the legislature will just allow itself to become a tool of convenience. Where is a comparative example of this in the contemporary world?
One of the fears that the Opposition must as a matter of priority begin to express is whether the Executive will adhere to what the Constitution and the laws require after the conclusion of the Local Government Elections. Under the new system, the Central Government can no longer decide how much money it will give to each Municipality and NDC. The rates are fixed according to population. But what if the government ignores the legal requirement as it is doing in other spheres?
The point is that after two years in Government, the PPP as the party that won the Executive after the 2011 elections has decided it will not recognize the separation of power. That is the point. Now there is the question. What will the Opposition do? The Opposition (both AFC and APNU) will not admit it but if they do nothing about it then they know that they have to go home and forget about contesting another general election because their supporters will not be interested in voting again.
I was talking at length to the administrator of the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, Mark Archer last Friday. Archer has a very interesting history which in another column I will write about. I was fascinated at his description of his years of service to Guyana as a soldier and the form his military career took. I didn’t know he returned to Guyana after thirty years abroad. When he told me that, I immediately interrupted him and asked how he would feel if the party he came back to serve should lose the next election. Before he could answer, I said to him; “You know that would mean six consecutive losses.” I am not going to print what was his response.
I brought up this Mark Archer event because I believe APNU and the AFC deep down inside their collective mind know that they will lose that combined majority they now have if the state of affairs continues. Human nature is not as backward as the AFC and APNU might think. If your supporters gave you a majority, and you did nothing with it, I believe you are incredibly short-sighted to think that those voters will feel the same way about you in another election. It is really a predicament for both APNU and AFC but more so APNU, which is by far the larger opposition party that gained five more seats than it got in 2006.

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