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President Donald Ramotar creates ‘one-party’ state

Nov 16, 2014 APNU Column

President Donald Ramotar has created Guyana’s first ‘one-party’ dictatorship. He promulgated a Proclamation to prorogue parliament on Monday 10th November 2014. He has, thereby, peremptorily paralysed the parliamentary process by preventing formal sittings of the National Assembly.
The President’s Proclamation stifled the voices of the people’s legitimate representatives in the National Assembly. The ‘Proclamation’ extinguished the expectations of the more than 175,000 Guyanese who, almost exactly three years ago in November 2011, voted for A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) and the Alliance for Change (AFC) to have the majority of seats in the National Assembly.
The fact is that, for the past three years, Donald Ramotar’s presidency has been failing. It has now reached its nadir. Public confidence in him and his cabinet has drained away. The President never accepted his party’s minority status and, consequently, he kept on trying to think, talk and behave as if he had a majority. He never had the interest, inclination or intelligence to adopt an ‘inclusionary’ approach to governance. He never had the experience to develop a strategy to manage an unruly cabinet, to work with the majority in the National Assembly and to seek solutions to serious national problems.
President Ramotar’s mindset and management style were misplaced. His public pronouncements on policy matters have been injudicious and inflexible. His propensity for making impudent personal attacks and accusations against the very persons whose agreement he needed to seek has been his undoing. His record of negotiations with the Opposition on every major matter was one of bad faith, frustration and failure.
The President’s act of ‘Prorogation’ is the epitome of unintelligence. He has made dialogue between the Opposition and the Government more difficult than before. He has poisoned the atmosphere for future talks between the two sides.
President Ramotar has now single-handedly and single-mindedly engineered a constitutional crisis in pursuit of a parochial plan to promote the PPPC’s partisan political programme at the expense of dealing with pressing national matters. The main purposes of the ‘Proclamation’ are to allow the PPPC to establish a ‘de facto,’ one-party dictatorship to avoid parliamentary scrutiny and to evade its responsibility to the people.
The President has invented a constitutional pretext to obstruct debate on the Opposition’s ‘no-confidence’ motion; to postpone the holding of local government elections; to prevent debate on financial excesses and impropriety; to protect delinquent ministers from parliamentary sanction and, most of all, to permit the PPP’s campaign for general and regional elections to proceed and provide for the continued expenditure of state funds without parliamentary scrutiny.
President Ramotar has infuriated the entire nation. He has ignited a firestorm of anger – among the free media; civil society; non-governmental organisations; professional organisations; religious organisations; political parties; social groups and trade unions – to resist his objectionable and obnoxious ‘Proclamation’ to prorogue parliament. He has clumsily contrived to attract criticism from international organisation and newspapers.
The President has no grounds for this gratuitous assault on parliamentary independence. Guyanese everywhere have launched a campaign to demand the restoration of parliamentary democracy by resisting the President’s resort to dictatorship. Guyanese are not prepared to accept this denial of democracy and to allow the President to implant a ‘one-party’ dictatorship in this country.

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