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An uneventful Congress

Aug 30, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The significance of the just concluded conference of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) is that the status quo ante remains intact. The top leadership of the party has been returned. The position of leader and Chairman and Treasurer were not contested. The incumbent Vice Presidents of the party were easily reelected.
The delegates to the Congress closed ranks last weekend behind embattled Minister of Public Health, George Norton. There was never any question about his being removed from his job at the Ministry.
If anyone was hoping that the President would have been pressured at Congress to take action against the Minister, they had better have second thoughts. George Norton, because of his long membership within the PNCR, is an untouchable. He did not need to ask for a chance. He was always going to have that chance, because both the PNCR and PPPC are not keen to go after their members for fear of being seen as bending to pressure from each other.
The PNCR will therefore not sanction any of its Ministers so long as the PPP calls for this. Similarly, the PPPC will not do likewise, as long as the PNCR is in the forefront of protests to remove Ministers.
The only Ministers who were forced to resign from the PPPC did so because of the closeness of controversies involving them to elections. If those incidents had both occurred six months earlier, those Ministers would not have been dismissed. The PPPC would have refused to take action.
Guyana is paralyzed by this tit-for-tat between these two political powerhouses. The PNCR does not wish to be seen as submitting to the PPPC and vice versa. Right now all talks about power-sharing are on hold, because neither side is in the mood for political cooperation. The PPPC finds it expedient not to engage with APNU+AFC. The governing coalition is not bothered by the fact that there is no political dialogue taking place between the two sides.
The Congress has merely confirmed that change cannot be had within the PNCR from within the highest decision-making forum of that party. The manner in which delegates are chosen and the control exercised by the old guard over the party groups makes such change impossible.
When change did seem possible over the past four years, there were controversies over the outcome of the elections. There were complaints about persons being disenfranchised. Complaints were also raised about the witnessing of the counting of the ballots. Those issues did not surface this time around, because the party is now part of the governing coalition and there were no really serious challenges to the leadership. In this regard, the lack of competition for the top leadership is a setback for internal democracy within the PNCR, but that has never been one of the party’s strong points.
The Congress did not come up with some important decisions about the pace at which things are moving in the government, but it is doubtful, given the way bureaucracies work, that any shake-up of the bureaucracy will make a difference. The damage to public administration has already been done.
The PPP had its faults, but a lot of the guys that it had in senior public service positions got things going quickly. They were not slackers. This is why the PPP despite the problems with absorptive capacity, always had an impressive implementation ratio of the Public Sector Investment Programme.
Many of those top officials have either now passed on or have been put out to pasture. The newcomers are getting their feet wet and it will take time for the system of public administration to move faster, providing that there is no more demoralization of the public service.
Congress offered no solutions to the problems of the economy. It found little fault with the coalition. There is nothing to change. Life must go on as usual.
Congress has come and gone. It is almost as if it was uneventful. Things have not changed within the party. It is left to be seen whether things will change in the country.

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