Separations of powers

Jul 17, 2019 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

According to the authorities, and I quote the Canadian one, “Caretaker governments may be put in place when a government in a parliamentary system is defeated in a motion of no confidence, or in the case when the House [Parliament] to which the government is responsible is dissolved, such governments should be in place for an interim period until an election is held and a new government is formed. In this sense, in some countries, which use a Westminster system of government, the caretaker government is simply the incumbent government, which continues to operate in the interim period between the normal dissolution of parliament for the purpose of holding an election and the formation of a new government after the election results are known. Unlike in ordinary times, the caretaker government’s activities are limited by custom and convention. Uniformly they are made to the code of not making decisions in government which are not for the purpose of the daily running of the state apparatus.”
Of course as I have been saying in these letters, our permanent secretaries are the ones who should be doing that. And to make my point again, I am going to have to get a little brutal now, and it is again just an example, but one which I know personally which is why I am using it. In September 1992, Mr. Harry Persaud was at the gate of the Houston Estate, Friday afternoons selling the Mirror Newspaper to the workers, which we were paying to grow sugar cane. The next month, in October 1992, Harry Persaud was the Minister in charge of Works and Transport, running it and making executive decisions!
And in this country after the Burnham regime, the public service was subverted to be a political rather than a professionally state run organisation, since at that time the party was paramount to the state. So Harry Persaud did not create this nonsense, he was just caught up in it, just as Dr. Jagan was, the problem was that they were in opposition for 28 years so had no idea what they had to do and that uncertainty went on for a very long time, years.
The very clear conclusion, in the present case, would be that any new decisions, which were not on the table prior to the proroguing of parliament should now be off the table.
Unlike some writers, but as a former chairman of the Economics Services Committee of the Guyana Parliament, I believe that the objective of a budget is to charter the course of a country, and commit funds therefore by what is fundamentally a document, which contains the philosophy of the thinking of the government at the time of its presentation, clearly such an action cannot possibly be regarded as routine caretaking.
And one has to remember that the main ruling of the CCJ is that the parliament was dissolved since December 2019 on the day that the NCM was passed.
Editor, in a Parliamentary Westminster system such as ours, to keep the separation of power between the Executive and the Legislative branch is not easy, and it is a construct, which has to be understood by all Guyanese. In America, the President begins his term several months after an election, because he is taking with him a completely new set of secretaries or as we know them, Ministers, to head the various departments of government: the secretaries of War, of State, of the Treasury, of agriculture, etc. These people are not chosen for their political accomplishments and activism but for their outstanding professional performances in their respective fields of endeavour.
They are not and usually have never been, senators or political functionaries of any kind. So to keep the separation of powers in the USA is very easy, since the heads of the Government Departments are not political appointees and are completely separate from the senate and the congress and are not members thereof. Mind you, the citizens of the US are kept informed by the media at all times looking for any one of the three arms of the government trying to influence the other.
In our Westminster system, the Ministers who will become the Executive branch of government, except the President, MUST be Members of Parliament i.e. they have to be members of the legislative branch and continue to be members of the legislative branch of government, before they can become the members of the executive branch of government, and so they continue at all times to be both members of the legislature, as well as members of the executive branch of government i.e. the Ministers and the Cabinet of the nation. In many countries with our system, this blurs the line between the legislative and the executive arms of government, but in our winner takes all system, I can very easily say that as we see it in operation daily, this division between the legislative arm and the executive arm does not exist at all, and for us it has been a recipe for disaster since they have put in place measures to exert control on the judicial arm of government.
So if this construct is legal, if there is no parliament, how can there be Ministers? However, the law abhors a vacuum, and so the law or the judiciary likes to see something, and sometimes anything, instead of nothing. So they have told us let the government now in power function as a caretaker government, we don’t know exactly what the CCJ judges view of a caretaker Government was, but we do not need to know, there are numerous authorities of what caretaker conventions and practices are from numerous countries around the world, Canada, Australia, India etc. to guide us. That is don’t do anything NEW just keep what has been the policies of the government prior to the NCM, ticking over until a new government is elected. If there can be consultations between the government and the opposition as to what EXACTLY are the GUYANA conventions of a caretaker, so much the better. Running back to the CCJ is just another practice of what has become usual practice in this country, an act of utter stupidity.
Systems, which are as politically corrupt as ours have become unworkable, owing to the misunderstanding of the successive governments we have had since independence, and I don’t mean corrupt in terms of dishonest, I mean corrupt in terms of the way it has evolved over time, giving far too many powers to the Ministers who are not well prepared to manage anything, and not enough power to the real accounting officers of the Ministries i.e. the Permanent Secretaries. It is clear that the situation has become a morass of corruption and stupidity. Moreover, our failure or lack of oversight as a nation exacerbates the situation considerably, but we allowed it. We the citizens of this country allowed it and we have to take back control of it! This is our country we own it, all of us, not Mr. Granger or Mr. Jagdeo. They must do what we want, not the other way around. They are haemorrhaging us too badly as a nation with the sort of unbridled skullduggery we see unfolding in the media daily, and so I want to salute the Kaieteur and Stabroek News’ especially for keeping it in our face daily, to force us to do something. Editor, we must always remember that evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
And on behalf of all Guyanese, I thank you.

Tony Vieira

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