Is Constitutional reform back on the front-burner?

Feb 24, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Two important developments took place Tuesday evening. The first relates to the observance of Republic Day and, the second, to constitutional reform.
When the PNC was in office, it gave greater prominence to Republic Day than to Independence. There was a political rationale to this bias. Burnham had declared Guyana as Cooperative Republic and while Independence came under him, Jagan is long seen as the architect of Independence.
After 1970, Burnham took Independence Day off of the national holiday calendar. The PPP/C restored it in 1996. The PPP/C took the decision in 1996 to reverse this emphasis. It opted to emphasize Independence and de-emphasize Republic Day. But it did not take Republic Day off the calendar. Instead it opted for a low-keyed flag-raising ceremony.

This decision was taken during the tenure of Education Minister Rev. Dale Bisnauth. At the time, there used to be a traditional flag-raising ceremony at the National Park but the PPP/C decided to cancel this, opting instead for a much simpler ceremony, at Parliament Building, devoid of speech making and cultural programmes. The PNC reacted angrily to this development, and, at one stage, had even begun to organise its own Republic Day flag raising event at the Square of the Revolution. But financial constraints soon put an end to this experiment.
Tuesday evening saw the Irfaan Ali administration make a departure from the PPP/C’s traditional approach to the Republic anniversary. There was an evening, as opposed to morning, flag-raising ceremony and there was speechifying and a grand cultural programme which surpassed anything before.

The new PPP/C, under ALI, knows how to put on a good show. The implication is that Irfaan Ali is restoring the former Republic Day flag-raising ceremony and is placing Republic Day on the same footing as Independence Day. This is a positive development since both national days hold significance for the country, regardless of who is perceived as the principal architect of Independence or Republican status.

The speechifying last Tuesday evening was jejune as best. The President spoke a lot of nonsense. His presentation generally was superficial especially with references to attitude, narratives, character, values and beliefs and objectivity. That sort of presentation is suited for a pulpit or a self-development course, not a national address to the nation.
But there was one aspect of his presentation which has already caught the public eye and which represents an important point of departure between himself and the former Jagdeo administration. In his address, the President signalled that, in order to support the development thrust, the governance system must be efficient, reliable, trustworthy, accountable, simple, responsive and flexible to the global environment and that these elements must be embedded in a modern constitution which must be developed from the people, a process that, he said, was ongoing.

While it is hard to uncover any evidence of an ongoing process to develop a modern constitution, his statement may be interpreted as a signal that constitutional reform is possible. Indeed a strong case can be made for updating the Constitution. A Constituent Assembly was established in 1978 following a fraudulent referendum which was intended to end all referenda. The final document was foisted on the Guyanese people and was intended to consolidate the political dictatorship at a time of rising political repression, including political assassinations.

The Constitution was modelled after Zambia’s Constitution and was part of the then dabbling with cooperative socialism which Burnham had copied from Tanzania. The PNC/R, the party of Burnham, and the PPP, the party of Jagan, no longer espouse socialist ideologies. Both now embrace a neo-liberal economic agenda which is incompatible with some of the economic objectives of the 1980’s Constitution which remained substantively intact despite the reforms which followed between 2001 and 2009.
The Constitution, for example, speaks about Guyana being in transition from capitalism to socialism. Guyana is now a capitalist society but with a socialist constitution.
There is a mix of a Presidential and parliamentary system which has been criticised as placing too much executive authority in the hands of the President – in fact all executive authority lies in the hands of the President. The socialist elements of the Constitution constitute a hindrance to the modern neo-liberal economic agenda of the country’s leaders. A simpler Bill of Rights and the purging of socialist references may be the result of the constitutional reform which the President says is ongoing. We shall have to wait and see if the promise of Constitutional change is just blow-blow. What is not likely to happen is a reversion, next year, to the traditional low-keyed Republic Day flag-raising. The new PPP/C loves a pantomime!
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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