The Speaker of the House: a House tarnished irreparably

Mar 18, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – There are fewer higher profile presences or positions in Guyana than that of the Speaker of the National Assembly. Some of the previous holders of this prestigious national office did succeed in elevating its responsibilities and workings to the heights. In an always demanding environment, they delivered works of skilled art, of circumspection, as they navigated between the push and pull of government and opposition respectively; understood the passions and expectations of the wider population; and recognized the cynicisms and distrusts that were the norms of their times and mostly draining duties. Some excelled, others managed, today one falters grievously and most ingloriously.

Today’s Speaker of Guyana’s House, I am absolutely sure, is a person of courage, a man of duty, a citizen of patriotic essences. But not when he is faced with the challenges that are those inseparable and unwavering characteristics that go along with being Speaker of Guyana’s august and pristine lawmaking body. The dignity and honor that are associated with this rare office abandon him. And with embarrassing haste. It as if all the goodness and thoughtfulness that I believe are possessed by the Hon. Speaker finds it necessary to vacate his suddenly radically different body. His mind tightens and narrows into knots, his hands coil and tense with readiness to strike at the heart and soul of whatever Opposition members, also honorable I remind all, table as motions. His face tells the story of his turmoil: a man caught between serving two less than illustrious masters -ingeniously deceptive seniors and decisions that damn him for a man not in control of his own actions, but someone who will go wherever led.

I ask Guyana, the whole world, including my American brothers (that they still are, I assure all) one simple question. How can full insurance coverage in all of its alarms and fears, as well as the sturdy convictions that come from its absence, not hurt this poor society, could not possibly more deeply imperil and further impoverish it? The Speaker is a bright enough Guyanese to know the answer(s) to that ordinary, most commonplace of inquiries. Yet, what he proceeds to do in the wise exercise of his high office speaks to not a Speaker of the National Assembly, the nation’s house, but a Speaker for Freedom House, or some other house of equivalent iniquity.

This is how the Speaker savages the great obligations that crowns his head, that is incorporated in the scepter his hand holds with so much of a pronounced tilt to the extreme. When the Speaker operates in this glaringly troubling, I should say offensive manner, he mangles what is supposed to be, expected to be, the unsullied integrity, even the solemn decorum, of the office of Speaker of the House.

When he insists on mangling opposition efforts to shine some light on it, to have a conversation on oil spill insurance, to weigh and measure the pluses and minuses of both its presence and absence, then he does a rank injustice to the safety, and much talked about potential for prosperity, of this country and its trapped, hapless peoples. When the Speaker, a man of honor that is of an especially distinctive strain, could bring himself to ask to be furnished with evidence of likely economic bankruptcy from a disastrous oil spill, then he did degrade himself beyond calculation. Indeed, those waters that wash over his head have not been traveled by Magellan or Vasco Da Gama; not even the man who visited some 20,000 leagues below the sea. I say the Speaker went beyond that nether level.

For what the Speaker said he stood for, or was put up to, represents seeking proof of a potentially punishing predicament before it happens. This is not of the Speaker measuring probability, but of his demanding reality to be created in advance for his edification. I don’t want to say it, but my own standing orders compel me: the Speaker may be rich in countless things, but in one massive and meaningful component he comes across as almost totally bankrupt. It is the wisdom that leads to discernment, even the visions that grace with little threads of understanding.

This day, I write of insurance only, but Guyanese with reasonable memories should recall some other damaging decisions taken by the Speaker through his blocking actions; or those that be more charitably described as cleverly diminishing or calculatedly protective. I point to the ill-starred and troubled gas to shore ambition (it is that, isn’t it, and for all the wrong reasons?), which was castrated by his Speaker’s scalpel; the ugly and, as Guyanese are already finding out, that also already haemorrhaging oil fund law.

If the Speaker could not stand fairly for matters that are so loaded with significance for this nation and its peoples, then there is little of anything else that he can stand for, or claim to stand for, which is also his official and personal prerogative. I don’t, and Guyanese shouldn’t, need the Clerk of the National Assembly to be the lonely messenger saddled with the task of enlightening us. When I consider all this, and much more, I recoil from what the office of the Speaker of the National Assembly has disintegrated into; this rubble, this degree of political arsonism, these deliveries of intolerable atrocities.

Sincerely,

GHK Lall

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