Guyanese must speak to the PPP now because Guyana is sinking

Jun 04, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

I do not think that, despite his immense political shortcomings, Clement Rohee would have boldly declared the Government’s demand for unconditional support for the anti-money laundering Bill by the opposition if this wasn’t the essential attitude of the PPP’s leaders, including Donald Ramotar.
Mr. Rohee, speaking at a press conference, was pellucid. There can be no connection between the passing of the Bill and the opposition’s insistence that the President assent to a number of Bills awaiting his signature. Rohee also said that there can be no connection between the passage of the anti-laundering legislation and the AFC request for the implementation of the Procurement Commission.
Rohee was clear that the opposition has to approach the anti-money laundering Bill based on the nature of the Bill itself and no other consideration.
So many things are wrong with this horrible, terrible, disastrous and putrid inflexibility. The first abomination to note is that this hauteur is coming from a government that has minority status in the second most powerful institution in the land – the Legislature. Basically the PPP is saying that only the Executive can determine the contents of legislation, but the very organ that the PPP does not control – the Legislature – must meekly and obediently accede to Government’s requests.
This is not only patently absurd. It is pregnant with volcanic implications. If you can openly tell the Parliament, in which you do not have majority support, that it has to comply with your every wish, then the complier is either a fool or a betrayer of those who voted for him/her. If an electorate made you the majority in the Parliament and you cannot wrest any concession from the Executive that needs your approval for their legislative agenda, then you are a conspicuous failure that lost your reason for being in politics.
Which sane opposition in any country will accept that kind of superior stance from a government that lost its majority in the National Assembly? There isn’t any. But how interesting that this superiority and inflexibility have their origin in the PPP’s rise to power in 1992 when the election format was shaped by a foreigner, President Jimmy Carter, whose intervention was accepted by President Hoyte.
The beneficiary of Hoyte’s generosity – the PPP Government – has now become the extreme opposite to what Hoyte was.
The second depravity is that politics, PPP-style, does not exist in the world any longer. In modern politics, compromise and concession are the main routes to peaceful settlements. And we don’t have to look far, but across to the US last week. The US Government traded five high-level Taliban leaders in Guantanamo for an American soldier held captive in Afghanistan for the past five years.
The Americans wanted their soldier whom they could not get without a concession. The Taliban had him, and the Taliban told the US ‘we will give him up if you give us something in exchange’. The Palestinians perform the same strategy when Israel wants the soldiers that are held prisoners. There is nothing sordid or strategic about such negotiations.
It is a law of politics and it happens in all type of politics, whether in international affairs or domestic situations.
Catalonia wants independence from a federal Spain, and to prevent that, the Spanish Parliament will have to give Catalonia vast magnitudes of autonomy.  Chancellor Merkel in Germany had to offer compromises on the welfare system and the economy to the Social Democrats in order to avoid a minority government.
The Democrats in the US, without a majority in the House, continue to make concessions to House Republicans.
Guyana must be the only country in the world where a minority regime tells its Parliament that it has to do what the Executive demands. The basic problem in Guyana today is that the PPP, at an absolute level, refuses to recognize that it lost the 2011 elections to the combined strength of the AFC and APNU.
It finds psychological comfort (and in the process fools itself) in the fact that the combined opposition only has a one-seat majority. So it dismisses the one-seat majority as an irregularity to be ignored.
It is interesting to apply the PPP logic to the World Cup in football which is about to get underway. If a country wins the Cup by a single goal then the world should not accept it as the winner because, after all that was just a mere one goal. The PPP’s inflexibility on the anti-money laundering Bill should alarm this nation. Guyanese must confront the PPP, because this land is going down quickly.

---

---