Is this self-destruction?

Nov 24, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

There is a lesson to be learnt by Guyanese stakeholders from the present drama that is going on in American politics between the Republicans and the Democrats. On Thursday, the US senate voted by a simple majority to do away with the filibuster rules with regards to the presidential nominations to federal courts and certain state appointments.
Filibuster is a tactic that allows debate on a Bill or a motion to go on indefinitely and can only be brought to an end by sixty votes in the Senate. Both Republicans and Democrats have used the filibuster throughout the more than two hundred years of American history. Neither side wanted to do away with it, because each found it a useful political weapon.
But matters went out of hand when in the past four months, Republicans have filibustered dozens of important appointments of President Obama, effectively reducing his presidential functions. The President’s party did not have sixty votes to end the filibuster.
Using a technicality last Thursday, the Democratic Senators voted by a simple majority to change the filibuster rules, except for appointments to the Supreme Court. This means that President Obama’s nominees could now go through. The lesson to be noted here is that a majority vote carried. Whether the Republicans liked it or not, they have to observe the American constitution and accept that by a majority vote, rules that existed for many, many moons in the US Senate have been changed, and by a parliamentary majority.
Guyana’s predicament is that since the 2011 elections, the ruling PPP has not accepted that it does not have control of Parliament and therefore it has to accept majority decisions. The configuration of Parliament was arrived at an election process that the PPP recognized, since that very election result also gave the presidency to the PPP. So on the one hand, the PPP accepts the election result for the Executive but rejects it for the Parliament. This is where the role of important stakeholders comes in.
Once the PPP began to reject an opposition-controlled Parliament in early 2012, and gridlock emerged, it was the nationalist duty of these stakeholders to act as earnest liaison. The Private Sector Commission (PSC) has most vulgarly abandoned that road and now Guyana may have to endure difficult economic times because of the non-approval by Parliament of the anti-money laundering legislation.
Trying to understand the way the people in the Private Sector Commission think is more difficult than studying the way fishes think. If the legislation fails because of opposition rejection, then why not talk to them? Why not engage them, because your interests are at stake. Instead, the PSC has taken the self-destructive pathway – it slavishly advances the position of the PPP that the opposition must pass the Bill.
If the PSC’s cry that financial trouble is coming is true, then that body has become self-destructive. The same can be said for the bankers’ association. If Guyana’s financial system will be severely devastated by crippling sanction from the globe’s major financial institutions, then only one method is available to our business folks – talk to the people who have the power to stop the disaster.
What the PSC and others have done is internalize the fear of reprisals since the results of the 2011 elections, and that has led it into a situation of sycophancy. Now this very servility threatens the business operations of the private sector.
The PSC is caught in a maze that it has created. After two years of bowing to the intransigence of the PPP, it cannot muster the intestinal muscle to go to the presidency and ask them to meet the opposition halfway. As a replacement for that obligation, it insists that the opposition must accede to the request of the Government.
In a country where the opposition won the general elections by their combined strength, it cannot form the government because of our peculiar constitution. In most, if not all political systems in the world, the constitution would have allowed for a coalition between APNU and the AFC to form a Cabinet. Yet stakeholders like the PSC want the opposition to behave as if it is a minority in Parliament. This is extreme naiveté.
Where do we go from here? Unless the PPP leadership goes to the table and a process of give and take is allowed to evolve, Guyana’s stagnation will continue. If a financial crisis is looming that will cripple our economy, then decent and patriotic stakeholders should immediately seek dialogue with the opposition, ascertain what it wants, then go to the PPP and ask for compromise. Nothing else will save Guyana.

 

 

---

---