The slowdown game

Jun 01, 2024 Editorial

Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s parliament has its procedures, then it has the people who push them to fruition, the purposes intended. The experience of the political opposition is that a notice is given of a question to be asked, or a matter to be tabled, only for the PPPC Government’s machinery to hum smoothly into action. The record is of the parliament humming, but there is no moving forward with the issues laid before it. It seems that the Speaker of the National Assembly, the traffic cop on duty, rarely looks in the direction of what the opposition puts forward as matters of national interest, a few of them rising to the level of serious urgency. With the Speaker in command of the flow, more than a few matters initiated by the parliamentary opposition grind to a halt. There is a system and an art to what is happening in parliament, and the Speaker of the House has become better and better at the slowdown game, the holding back of the clock practice.

Opposition MP, David Patterson, presented the public with a tutorial on what is on the rise in Guyana’s parliament when his group submits motions and questions. According to Mr. Patterson, “when you submit a Motion, as long as it doesn’t offend any of the Standing Orders, it is approved immediately and then the Minister has 21 days to respond.” There is process, then there is practice. It is what we at this paper call politics taking charge of process leading to an ugly reality. The motions and questions are acknowledged, then forwarded to the desk of the Speaker. This is where the bottlenecks begin, and they are long, viz., could take several months. The expectation in the words of Patterson is that whenever a submission does not collide with the Standing Orders, “it is approved immediately, and then the minister has 21 days to respond.”

For reasons known only to the Speaker of the House, the expected continuity of the item/motion/question is not proceeding with energy but runs into a wall. The matter is left on the Speaker’s desk for “quite some time and by the time it gets on the Order Paper, it is dated.” When there is nothing from the opposition leaving the Speaker’s desk, then there can be no discussion, no debate. No discussion translates to nothing for the media to report on that particular matter raised, including those related to the vital oil and gas sector, national security, or transparent governance, among other matters. It is perplexing that matters such as these encounter resistance from the parliamentary conductor, about what is allowed to move as opposed to what is held up for an inordinate amount of time. Opposition MP, Annette Ferguson pointed to the 6 months and 19 days that it took for her question about an office complex to receive a response from the responsible minister. Being forced to wait for more than a half year on any matter qualifies to be labeled a study in prevarication, an insult to the parliamentary process. In the normal course of life, if it was a health issue that person could be gone.

This is what appears to be going on. Matters get glued for an extended period to the Speaker’s desk, and by the time that the Speaker allows the matter to be ventilated in a session of parliament, its relevance has faded, its life all but over. Is it that the Speaker is playing the delaying game so that the subject minister can have enough time to arrange the lining up of his cover story? Give any man or woman enough time and they become miracle workers. When politicians are involved, and they have been given enough time, they can manufacture any magic wand “to go and hide, change, and correct the information that they have to provide. Under the gavel of the Speaker, it is the symmetry of the system (and art) that we mentioned earlier. Far be it for us to conclude that the Speaker is a docile party to any political conspiracy. But he has gained considerable strength, it is obvious, at clock management that’s advantageous. Information that Guyanese should know lose vitality.

David Patterson, Opposition MP, PPPC Governments, the National Assembly, the Speaker’s desk

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The slowdown game

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