Category: Letters to the editor

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Bacchus’ excursion avoids the real issues concerning Nandlall

Attorney-at-Law Murseline Bacchus (S/N November 27), to defend Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, against irresistible inferences of illegality from his infamous telephone conversation with Kaieteur News (KN) senior reporter, Mr. Leonard Gildarie, takes us back to a case 184 years ago in feudal England.

Mr. Bacchus was purportedly responding to a report in the Kaieteur News of Thursday November 6, 2014, under the caption “The world is watching police investigation – APNU”.

In the article, Mr. Joseph Harmon, an Opposition frontbencher and himself an attorney-at-law, raised concerns about the capacity and integrity of the authorities to undertake an independent investigation into the telephone conversation in which Mr. Nandlall objectified women; solicited for sexual purposes, on behalf of an uncle, a reporter of the newspaper; confessed to restraining the same uncle from taking serious criminal action against the newspaper proprietor; admitted to corruption involving public funds, drew attention to the increased activity against KN following the accusation by KN’s proprietor that his vehicle (Nandlall) was engaged in taking photographs of the newspaper building; declared knowledge of [an] impending armed attack[s] against the newspaper and its staff, and referred to a deal involving the President with the proprietor’s wife over a tax evasion matter.

This was, of course, the same conversation in which Nandlall boasted of his blood descent from the ancient Hindu warrior caste, Kshatriya, and encouraged Mr. Gildarie to leave his current employer and join the “elitist’ press unit being set up by the Government.
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Clarification on Government can spend up to November 30, 2015 without approval

One person has raised directly with me, and another through the Stabroek News blog, asking for clarification or explanation on how I arrived at the date of November 30, 2015 to which a re-elected PPP/C could spend money without going to the National Assembly.

I set out below a Table showing the Timeline based on my understanding of the Constitution of Guyana and the assumption that the PPP/C is re-elected, whether as a majority or on a plurality. It also assumes that the PPP/C will take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the increasingly exposed anti-democratic Constitution.

20141114_Table1
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Not a ‘marginal’ reduction in population

The 2012 census data are now out. The report shows that Guyana’s population has dropped to 747,884, down from 751,223 recorded for 2002. Taking an arithmetic approach Chief Statistician and Census Officer Lennox Benjamin calculates and describes the decline of 3,339 as a “marginal reduction.”

I would have had no difficulty with our Chief Statistician if he had simply provided the figures and let analysts and commentators consider their implications, or himself do so. In a matter involving so many components it is misleading, even dangerously so, to take two bald figures, subtract one from the other and then make a qualitative judgement therefrom about substantial or marginal. Mr Benjamin then adds the gratuitous comment that the “marginal reduction” was “mainly influenced by migration.”

There is nothing marginal about the numbers. If we add to the population of 751,223 persons in 2002 the 124,805 representing the number of births over deaths over the same period, the population at 2012 should have been 876,028 persons. In other words, we have lost at a minimum 128,144 persons. I describe this as minimum because over the past 10 years Guyana has attracted an indeterminate number of mainly Brazilians and Chinese at a rate not experienced by this country for more than 70 years.

If the number of inward immigrants is put conservatively at 1,000 persons per annum, it means that Guyana has lost a staggering 138,144 persons to outward migration, on a population that is less than three-quarters of a million.

Surely, surely it is time for those who manage this country to reflect on the causes why Guyanese are still leaving this country in droves and on the implications for the country of its best, brightest, most productive and ablest persons opting to leave.

I will review more fully the preliminary report on the 2012 census this weekend.

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It is the President’s duty alone to appoint three members of the Judicial Service Commission

Mr Anil Nandlall, Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs needs to take his own advice to the media to “exercise care in what is published” (‘President consulting on appointments to JSC, other commissions –AG,’ SN, March 18). In seeking to divert blame from himself for failing to advise the President on his duty to appoint the Judicial Service Commission, Mr Nandlall blamed the National Assembly for failing to initiate the process for nominating members with respect to the commission.

There is at least one of three explanations for the almost continuous stream of statements earning Mr Nandlall some unfavourable attention: he is careless about details, as he was in relation to the Council of Legal Education necessitating a correction by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies; he is cavalier about the constitution and the law, as in his statement that he has to issue an Assent Certificate to Bills passed by the National Assembly; or he is mischievous and obfuscatory, as in this case.
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Was Whittaker articulating government policy?

On March 7, 2014, the Stabroek News carried an article in which Mr Norman Whittaker, Minister in the Ministry of Local Government is reported as asserting that the “vast majority of the populace is not prepared for the holding of local government polls by August 1st” and that “to go ahead would result in the waste of a lot of money.”

Even by the standards of inanity now associated with the “vast majority” of the PPP/C and government spokespersons, Mr Whittaker’s statement is outstanding for its disconnect with the Constitution of Guyana and the laws relating to local government elections. But it may be more than simple ignorance: it shows the little or no regard which PPP/C ministers have for democracy and the drift to autocracy which Guyana has suffered since democracy returned to it in 1992 and the last local government elections were held in 1994.

Even if Mr Whittaker had read only up to Article 12 of the constitution he would be aware that “local government by freely elected representatives of the people is an integral part of the democratic organisation of the State.” He would also have some passing familiarity with the fact that Chapter VII in its entirety is devoted to Local Democracy, and that Article 71 pronounces that “Local Government is a vital aspect of democracy and shall be organised so as to involve as many people as possible in the task of managing and developing the communities in which they live.”

I do not for a moment believe that Mr Whittaker is unfamiliar with those articles. What I believe is his real problem – apart from the dread that local government elections will be disastrous for the PPP/C – is Article 75 which allows for local democratic organs to be autonomous. Not surprisingly, a party whose article of faith seems based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, has successfully delayed local government elections for seventeen years, depriving citizens of their constitutional rights.

The citizens of Guyana expect that those responsible for the holding of local government elections will discharge their constitutional and statutory duties. We have a full-time Elections Commission (GECOM) which between 2007 and 2013 inclusive, but excluding election year 2011 benefited from ten billion, four hundred and seventy six million dollars ($10,476 million).

The Local Authorities (Elections) Act gives the power (and the duty) to fix the date for local government elections to the Minister of Local Government. Mr Whittaker has no discretion as to whether citizens want such elections or not and he should be confronted in the National Assembly with his unbelievable nonsense. Moreover, the President or his Governance Advisor must tell the country whether Mr Whittaker was articulating government policy.

The parliamentary opposition and civil society organisations must now provide the leadership to stop this abuse of citizens’ constitutional rights and do everything that is necessary to ensure that local government elections which were due since 1997 are held no later than August 1, 2014.