Constitutional Reform, Again

Jan 20, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Last week, a parliamentary standing committee was formed, with little fanfare or announcement from either side of the divide. That committee was the Standing Committee on Constitutional Reform, Chaired by Attorney-General, Anil Nandlall, SC, and with representation by four other members from the ruling People’s Progressive Party/Civic and four members from the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC).

On its part, while the PPP/C stayed away from expressly promising CR on the campaign trail, deflecting with the not unwarranted promise to focus on constitutional compliance in the wake of then President David Granger’s propensity for interpreting the Constitution so liberally as to be corrected multiple times by the courts, the December meeting of the former Presidents, all PPP/C, saw an express commitment to look at both constitutional and electoral system reform.

According to a Department of Public Information Report on the outcome of the meeting, President Irfaan Ali was quoted as saying: “Different ideas on Constitutional Reform – not only ideas but how the former presidents saw the issues of Constitutional Reform, how it should be undertaken – were discussed…”

Considering this, it is strange that the government did not take the opportunity to lay out its agenda for CR on the establishment of the Standing Committee last week.

The major parliamentary opposition itself has gone completely silent on CR, a bizarre phenomenon that has been in place for the past year, ever since Granger launched his ‘Decade of Development’ manifesto. Whereas in previous campaigns the political machinery headed by Granger was fairly detailed in its presentation of plans for reform, the APNU+AFC incumbent had three single lines in the DoD pamphlet:

“* Continue The Work Of The Constitutional Reform Consultative Commission,

* Continue The Allocation Of Funding For Country-Wide, Community Consultations,
* Commit To Contributing To A Constitution Which Reflects The Will Of The Wider Society, Country-Wide.”
Of those three lines, the first two were patently false, considering that the Constitutional Reform Consultative Commission was never in fact actually established so no work could “continue” not having ever started in the first place, and hence no allocation of funding could be continued since any such funding would require the Consultative Commission to have actually been established. The third line is of course not only meaningless in itself, but also absolutely contrary to the Granger administration’s actions on Constitutional Reform with a Constitutional Reform Consultative Commission Bill having created since 2017, only after tremendous pressure by the international community, but parked by the administration since then.
There is of course another element to the equation, the presence of a smaller party – or rather three smaller parties – in Parliament. The joinder list of the Liberty and Justice Party (LJP), A New and United Guyana (ANUG), and The New Movement (Guyana) are currently represented in Parliament via the single seat currently occupied by LJP leader, Lenox Shuman. More surprising than the silence of the major players when it comes to the issue of Constitutional Reform, is the silence of the smaller parties on not only reform in general but the fact that they have zero representation on the Standing Committee.
It seems therefore that there exists no champion of Constitutional Reform currently in the National Assembly, which means that yet another political administration will likely come and go without any significant progress on fixing a fundamentally flawed constitution.

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