Our constitution must not be viewed as if it is written in stone

Mar 04, 2014 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I refer to my letter which was published by both the Stabroek and the Kaieteur Newspapers on Saturday 1st March 2014.
I wish to thank those who appreciated my letter in Stabroek News’ comments section, the one person who sought to abuse me is entitled to his own opinion. I don’t respond to faceless people when they hurl abuses at me under cover of some fictitious name. Let him stand in front of me and repeat it. I do however wish to respond to two other comments, and I do it in this forum since they are common misunderstandings and should be corrected for my point to be fully understood.
Our constitution does not forbid the formation of a coalition of parties after an election for the purpose of controlling the parliament, thereby giving legality to the government and establishing sovereignty of the people. What the flawed article 177 tells us is that the party with the most votes can name the presidential candidate. It does not say that he/she, knowing the consequences, is not free to ask one of the other parties which got fewer votes to join him/her to form the government which will have enough seats to control the parliament and establish sovereignty of the people (which would have been the sensible thing to do in our situation to avoid all of the confusion going on now).
And by not doing this, it is my opinion that the President formed the government in violation of the sovereignty of the people and it is therefore acting illegally in all matters.
I don’t want anyone to believe that I am inciting anything, since I see this as being solved by the legal system at the CCJ, but everyone who represents the majority of the voters in this country must act quickly to rectify the ridiculous position in which we find ourselves, i.e., every decision, every act by this government which is denying the majority of the people their constitutional right to sovereignty, is acting unlawfully.
Our constitution must not be viewed as if it is written in stone; it must conform to international norms of constitutional law, especially in cases like ours where two distinct articles are conflicting with each other.
One other comment in the SN deals with the definition of “sovereign” and the writer concludes that “The kernel of the problem is that you [me] are wrongly interpreting the term “sovereign” politically and not legally which is in fact [how] it must be interpreted from a constitutional perspective”.
Actually this is not so, since I have never used the word “sovereign”. I am using the words as they exist in the constitution, i.e. “Sovereignty belongs to the people” and the online dictionary tells us this: “Popular sovereignty or the sovereignty of the people is the principle that the authority of the government is created and sustained by the consent of its people, through their elected representatives (Rule by the People), who are the source of all political power. Popular sovereignty expresses a concept and does not necessarily reflect or describe a political reality. It is usually contrasted with the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, and with individual sovereignty. The people have the final say in government decisions”.
Benjamin Franklin expressed the concept when he wrote, “In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns”.
This cannot be possible when the government does not have the mandate or confidence of the majority of the people. This is all that I am saying.
Tony Vieira

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