President and Opposition Leader must find common ground for meeting agenda

Apr 24, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

On Wednesday, the media reported that His Excellency, President Irfaan Ali had reached out to the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton, with an invitation for consultations on appointments. Some of these appointments, long pending, are for offices of the highest importance. I unreservedly commend the President for stepping forward with this timely, necessary invitation. My expectation was that the Opposition Leader would respond positively and early. He did, but attached his own issues, as vital parts of the meeting’s agenda, which should have the urgency of local leadership summit.
I hope that the Opposition Leader’s response, and the agenda items that seem nonnegotiable, are not showstoppers. That is, they derail what is crucial for this society. I scan the list of items that Mr. Norton announced, and agree that most have a place in any President-Opposition Leader conversation of substance. It should not be limited to consultation on appointments, since there is so much more going on in Guyana, mostly on the malfeasance side, and all of which cry out for discussion and solutions. Nevertheless, I cannot see how the Government’s side, meaning the President, would allow most of the matters tabled by Mr. Norton’s to be folded into the meeting/consultation on appointments to service commissions. As carried by Demerara Waves on April 21 under the caption “Opposition Leader wants governance, other issues to be added to the agenda with President”, quite a few of those areas pinpointed by Mr. Norton represent Achilles heels for the PPP Government; its clever people are not going to want to touch those with a 10-foot pole.
I think that, given the likely disagreements embedded in those issues, and the accompanying fallouts, the President would either resist or drag his feet about including them in any present agenda. Still, I respectfully recommend that both leaders refrain from drawing any red lines, regarding what must be on the table of discussion and what can’t be. I urge both men to take the mature approach, and work around the original limited agenda issued by the President, and the more expansive one coming from the Opposition Leader, to find common ground for compromise. I know compromise is a dirty word locally, but it is the first meaningful test about how sincere both leaders are. No leader, and no side, should want to get everything; or prepare for such a meeting, with the usual all or nothing mentality. That will move us to nowhere, gets us nothing, other than what we live with today rather uneasily.
For his part, Mr. Norton managed to sound flexible as well as steely simultaneously. When asked what his response would be should the President balk, he parried with his use of the word “reasonable” to describe the kind of man he assumes the President is, maybe he hopes him to be. In the next breath, he also answered that he was ready with his own thinking (possibly fallback options) if the President were to prove to be unreasonable. From my vantage point, reasonable and unreasonable are heavy-duty words, when the contexts of Guyana are considered. They possess attitudes, likely qualities, of a hand outstretched in expectation, while managing to convey an element of cautioning that any road that could be construed to be “unreasonable” should be shelved, since what follows thereafter could be problematic, even undesirable.
Given the swift and spirited, if not targeted, response of the Opposition Leader to the President’s invitation, the ball is now in the latter’s court, and he must run forward with it quickly. He must not call timeout, or put the ball out of play. I think that that would be a blatant foul. I believe the President has a duty to see this through unflinchingly, without sweating. He must not shrink from discussing the nationally serious issues that his opposition counterpart put before him. This is what wise and profound leaders do. I think that President Ali, if he works hard at it, may surprise himself by finding that he has a little of both wisdom and profoundness inside of him, which I generously grant the young leader.
Separately, I note that while the Opposition Leader did identify the Natural Resource Fund and patrimony, he was silent, on overall oil management. Perhaps, his “good governance” issue is a big enough umbrella under which to cover oil-related matters. Nonetheless, I would suggest that the Opposition Leader makes that same oil and its stewardship a lynchpin of any conversation that he engages in, since it represents so much for Guyanese today and beyond. I would go so far as to say that national destiny and national peace could very well hinge on this oil.
Now both leaders have spoken and/or written. Now both men should continue to probe for ways to go forward for a different Guyana. I will give both of them, the benefit of positive visions for all of this society. They have much work to do, hard work, to get from where we are to a place that is higher and better.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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