The Speaker – rankly partisan or robustly patriotic

Mar 22, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – We address again today the state of the Speaker of the National Assembly. For as the Speaker goes, so does, to a great degree, the National Assembly itself. It is not an ordinary place, the regular routines of gathering for discussing and deciding, but the national house of Guyanese, each and every one of them, and as it goes so, too, do the interests and the prospects of this society. It can be argued that the very quality of life of the Guyanese people in their diverse presences is impacted by the comportment and kind of leadership that the Speaker of the National Assembly brings with him, and lays on the table for the fullest of fair dissections. Man and office either stand or fall on the basis of his rulings, the sum of his outputs.
We would like very much to say that the Speaker has conducted himself well in the delivery of his much-watched duties, the nuances of his conclusions, the wisdoms embedded in his thought processes, and the places they lead him. For when he rules this way or that, it is more than a Motion from a Member of Guyana’s Parliament that is involved. It is about what could become the law of this seemingly lawless land. From such law comes rules and regulations, and following on the heels of those, there are policies and procedures to guide us forward in the daily implementation and enforcement of what started out as a Motion from the mind of a Member and his political group, and made its way in final form into law.
It does not matter whether such a Motion emerges from the Government side, or that of the Opposition, the Speaker’s role is to be that much longed for referee standing inside the ring of contesting and grappling for political edge. The Speaker must be seen as neutral, and actually be exemplary in what are the best representations of an independent presence and mediator. He is judge, and to some extent, he is also jury; and like juries, sometimes what they come up with boggles justice and reason.
They can be so unfathomable that numerous questions are raised on what kind of deliberation went into the process with which they are saddled. Perhaps, more importantly, what were the types of bias they left behind, or insisted on bringing to the mix, or were influenced to introduce into what is considered sacred proceeding. In these hallowed instances of men and women searching painstakingly for truth and what could pass for fairness and justness, integrity and honour must not desert, or great injustices will be inflicted.
In Guyana’s National Assembly today, these are the winds and realities that swirl around the increasingly beleaguered Speaker. Is he or isn’t he, that is, one-sided? Meaning, someone whose neutrality and independence, those elements that are the soaring, non-negotiable hallmarks of a hallowed office, are largely lacking, hence imaginary? The Speaker’s growing list of handiworks is the sword that he can proudly hold aloft, or which condemns him, in that they speak unambiguously of where he has stumbled, fallen woefully short.
From our perspective, the Speaker of the National Assembly has not helped his cause, has not lived up to the muscular perceptions for an officeholder, who must be purer than Caesar’s wife. He has faltered, he has flattered, he has failed, and in so doing he has fallen flat on his face repeatedly, with what makes no sense, is minus a smidgen of reasoning.
The Speaker has repeatedly crumbled under expectations, when the weight of national realities has been presented before him, when he stood in the solitariness of supreme judge. The Speaker had to be the Guyanese standard-bearer on oil and gas, he was not. He failed to be the soldier in defense of national security that he should have been, when there is flashback to the riotous, now settled, Natural Resource Fund Law. Even as something as endangering as lack of oil spill insurance and pandemic concerns, the Speaker was on the wrong side of what is right, what is nationally important.
He now stands with the legacy of his work, the punishing quality of its well-earned self-condemnations.

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