Nandlall doesn’t understand the difference between a state paper and a newspaper

Dec 21, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The supremacy of the Constitution (article 8) would compel us to say that we must never trivialize or diminish the distinction between Guyana’s position of a written Constitution and, Britain’s unwritten constitution position. The written words of the Constitution may be at variance with British unwritten customs and constitutional practices and traditions. Such variance, the Premier found out in Western Nigeria when, acting pursuant to powers conferred by its written Constitution on the Governor General to remove him if in his (i.e. the Governor General’s) opinion the Premier no longer commands the support of the majority of the members of the House of Assembly; the Governor removed him in a manner inconsistent (so it was argued by the Premier’s lawyers) with the unwritten constitutional traditions, customs and practice of Britain. (Adegben ro V Akintola et anor (1963) 3 All ER544 P.C) esp. at pages 550 – 551)
Erskine May expounds about Britain’s House of Commons. It is callous for Anil Nandlall to take the high ground that May’s work is “conclusive” on a matter here in Guyana’s National Assembly. Our Speaker has the constitutional duty, and of course the jurisdictional freedom, to differ from Erskine May if he considers it right, on just grounds, to do so. It appears that Mr. Nandlall would consider this, heresy. But he must be reminded that constitutional traditions/practices etc. are not generated in some vacuum but, not invariably, are shaped and characterized by a country’s own social, political and historical vicissitudes. Political maturity or immaturity (as the case is) has a lot to do with the fashioning of unwritten rules in any Parliament. I daresay, ours is not the same as with the British House of Commons, hence, the case for fairness in our National Assembly’s rules of procedure.
Turning now to Mr. Nandlall’s veiled derision about my lack of training. I daresay it is a nonpoint. It would have been credible for him to point out that Mr. Edwards has no practical experience whatsoever in the idiosyncrasies and curiosities of the National Assembly. But, yet with his presumed training, he fails to appreciate the obvious differentiation in law, and fact, between a “state paper” on the one hand; and a daily newspaper of general circulation (the Kaieteur News) on the other hand. Legal research and writing taught us that those two subject matters are plainly distinguishable; but instead of distinguishing them (as I do) he resorted to the somewhat questionable and arguably inadmissible method of conclusion by extrapolation and deduction from Erskine May’s writings about “state paper”.
The authors of May’s work would be revolted that it should be so miscontextualized and represented to your readership as authority for his conclusion; to which it bears absolutely no relation at all, given the facts that the subject matter and issue raised by the Speaker’s ruling was the (non)compellability to produce a referenced daily newspaper. For Mr. Nandlall, there is a conceptual equivalency between “state paper” and the Kaieteur News. The law may be an ass; but it cannot be so asinine as that. So, again, I ask – what reason can there be in logic or in commonsense for a rule (Mr. Nandlall’s conclusion) that requires a Minister to produce a newspaper if he/she refers to it but not any other member of the National Assembly, hence, my Orwellian characterization of his conclusion.
Editor, permit me space to demonstrate a medical analogy (for a better grasp by your readership of the legal intricacies) and hopefully dissuade Mr. Nandlall from a further persistence with his error. Here is the analogy – a surgeon trained in the field of organ transplant, transplants an organ from a person with blood group A (cf. the “state paper”) to a patient with blood group B (cf. the Kaieteur News); but because of the genetic incompatibility between blood group A and B, the receiving patient’s body would reject the organ (cf. the (non)compellability to produce the referenced material issue) and it would perish.
Mr. Nandlall who has training in the field of parliamentary matters is doing a transplant from the “state paper” (blood group A) to the KN (blood group B) of the organ (the (non)compellability to produce). The inevitable result is rejection by the KN; the organ perishes; the transplant operation fails. In legal parlance we call this blood group differentiation – distinguishing. In legal practice, an error (however elementary) does not produce a fatality; but the point is made.
Maxwell Edwards
Attorney-at-law

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