Democracy on stilts

Nov 30, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

(Kaieteur News) – In Guyana, democracy has lately been standing on stilts. It has been tottering, wavering, and looking altogether unsafe, as though one sudden breeze might send it toppling.

A nation that only months ago dissolved its Parliament, held elections, and waited nearly two months—an eternity in political time—before summoning the new Assembly, now finds itself stumbling again, as if unsure whether it still remembers how its own constitutional legs are supposed to move.

It is worth restating the arithmetic, if only because the numbers are as scandalous as they are simple. The 12th Parliament was dissolved on 3 July 2025. Elections were held on 1 September. But Parliament did not meet until 3 November. This left the country without its principal law-making organ for a full third of the year. In most democracies, the absence of Parliament for such a stretch would be treated as a national emergency—an oxygen shortage in the very chamber through which a democracy breathes.

And just when Guyanese citizens might have hoped that the first sitting would be the beginning of a return to political normalcy, they were instead greeted with a strange form of inaction. More than a month has now passed since that first sitting, yet the political leadership has failed to convene the simplest meeting required to elect a Leader of the Opposition. This is not a clerical oversight. It is not a trifle, nor a missed appointment that can be shrugged off with bureaucratic excuses. It is a direct affront to parliamentary democracy.

A Parliament without a Leader of the Opposition is a half-built house. It has walls but no windows, a roof but no door through which dissent may enter. The Leader of the Opposition is not a decorative bauble in the national display case; he is the constitutionally recognized counterweight—the ballast without which the ship lists dangerously to one side. To postpone his election is to tamper with the keel of the vessel, to weaken its structure while insisting it continue sailing.

But the infection does not end at the national level. Local democracy, too, has come under the weather, coughing and wheezing toward paralysis. Region 10, has found itself deadlocked in the election of a chairman. The law—clear, unambiguous, crafted precisely for such moments—provides a mechanism to continue the process of electing a chairman. Yet this mechanism has been treated as though it were an old bicycle in the yard: useful once, but now left in the rain, rusting, ignored.

The failure to trigger the legal procedure is not mere negligence. It is a quiet declaration that rules are optional, that democratic processes are conveniences rather than commitments.

Such patterns do not arise by accident. Democracies do not die with gunfire or tanks in the street; they die in the slow suffocation of procedures, in meetings that are never called, in offices left vacant, in laws that are conveniently forgotten. They die when public officials treat constitutional duties as burdens rather than obligations. Guyana is not yet at the point of democratic collapse, but it is certainly flirting with the symptoms—shortness of breath, irregular heartbeat, an alarming disinterest in its own survival.

Which brings us to the international community, that chorus of well-meaning institutions that speak solemnly about democratic ideals while writing cheques to governments that undermine them. If the European Union and other bilateral partners are sincere—if their commitment to democracy is more than diplomat-speak polished for press releases—then now is the moment to act. Guyana should not receive one euro, one dollar, one cent of development assistance until it demonstrates haste, not lethargy, in restoring the functions of its democracy.

There must be immediate summoning of the meeting to elect a Leader of the Opposition. There must be immediate activation of the legal process to resolve the Region 10 impasse. Anything less is a pantomime of democracy, a puppet show with strings tangled behind the curtain.

Guyana stands at a precipice where democratic erosion is not theoretical but visible, measurable, and worsening. To ignore this is to allow the stilts to wobble further, to indulge the fantasy that a nation can remain upright while tossing aside the very instruments that steady it. Democracy, like any living organism, must be tended. When it is not, it begins to rot from the inside out.

The warning signs are flashing. The time for polite throat-clearing is over. Only decisive internal action—and external pressure—can keep the stilts from snapping.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

---

• Democracy, Elections, Peeping Tom, stilts

---