Category: Letters to the editor

Parliament was prorogued in late September, meaning that we now have no parliament and the passage of new laws including those for incurring of new debts must await the next parliament. However, to ensure that the wheels of government do not grind to a halt, the constitution provides for the executive, including the president and the cabinet, to remain in office until a new government is installed. The government meanwhile assumes a holding mode, sometimes loosely described as a lame duck government.

Our constitution does not specify, or indeed restrict, the powers of the government during this holding period. That does not mean the government can do as it pleases. Indeed what it should do is to follow convention and good practice and limit its actions, decisions and expenditure to what the National Assembly approved before prorogation. Accordingly, the decisions they should make and action taken should be restricted to routine, operational matters.

It would not be appropriate for example for the government to enter into a new international treaty or to make a decision on matters that would require parliamentary approval, whether in the form of authorisation or the provision of finance. I understand that the constitutions of some countries limit the actions such holding governments can take, thus making it unconstitutional for them to do the kinds of things that have become routine under the increasingly lawless PPP/C.

The thinly disguised Cabinet Outreach, outboard engines and fertilizer of 2006 are modest compared with the multibillion agreements we have been hearing about since the announcement of elections. A few days ago we learnt from Jamaica that Jagdeo has signed a secret deal with the Chinese for an investment of $27 billion on the Timehri Airport, and from the local press that he is borrowing $4 billion from India for a specialty hospital, and is committing several billion dollars for an overpriced Marriott Hotel.

We have become so accustomed to this lawlessness that we simply dismiss Mr Jagdeo’s actions as further cases of his routine violations of the constitution, some of which concern the protection afforded by the constitution. These include the appointment of an Ombudsman, the Public Procurement Commission and the integrity of the Consolidated Fund and the Contingencies Fund.

There are two important consequences to these actions: whether it is proper for the Jagdeo administration to tie the hands of the successor government; and the impact of such actions on the elections. The first touches on the constitutional issue of whether a successor government (PPP/C, APNU or AFC) should consider itself bound by these reckless decisions. Unfortunately Mr Donald Ramotar appears to be a party to most of the recent excesses and would seem to be allowing himself little or no room to revisit any of them. It would seem from their pronouncements that the other major parties are committed to revisiting and quite probably rescinding a number of the recent deals, with the Amaila Project heading the list. That could put Guyana on a collision course with investors and tarnish the country’s reputation as an investment destination.

On the issue of the fairness of the elections, I think it would be hard for anyone to conclude that house lots to communities, subventions for Veterans Homes, salary increases to public servants and the disciplined services, the signing of new contracts with major tax concessions and or state borrowings, the payment of discretionary sums from the ruling party office and the opening of miscellaneous facilities by the President and his ministers are not intended to and will not influence the vote. That means the elections – whatever the result – will not be free and fair and one hopes that the Elections Observer Missions are taking note.

Over the last fourteen years I have tried to convince GECOM and the political parties to have some form of campaign finance rules. Mrs Sheila Holder actually tabled a motion in the National Assembly on this. The PPP/C simply stalled. As a result we have neither campaign rules nor restrictions on the use of state resources for party political purposes.

It is a gift for a president who has no sense of constitutional convention or propriety, has no respect for the rule of law, and indulges himself with the belief that he is all powerful.

I am today sending to the Chief Elections Officer of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) the following letter in connection with the list of nominations which is to be presented to him for the November 28 national elections.

Mr. Gocool Boodhoo,
Chief Elections Officer,
Guyana Elections Commission
Main Street,
Georgetown

Dear Sir,

Eligibility criteria for election to the Guyana Parliament

I am writing to remind you of the following two Articles of the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana relating to the eligibility for election to the National Assembly.

1. Article 53 – Qualifications for election as members states as follows:

‘Subject to Article 155 (which relates to allegiance, insanity, and other matters) a person shall be qualified for election as a member of the National Assembly if and shall not be so qualified unless he:

a) is a citizen of Guyana of the age of 18 or upwards; and
b) is able to speak, and unless incapacitated by blindness or other physical cause, to read the English language with a degree of proficiency sufficient to enable him to take an active part in the proceedings of the Assembly.’

2. Article 155 (1) of the Constitution states:

‘No person shall be qualified for election as a member of the National Assembly who is, by virtue of his own act, under any allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state.’

I am assuming that the Leader of each Party’s List of candidates for the national elections as well as you in your capacity as Chief Elections Officer are not unaware of the clear import and intent of these provisions and in particular Article 155 (1). It is my view that there is a serious obligation on your part to verify that the eligibility requirements are satisfied. You should be aware too that while there might have been breaches in the past, this cannot justify a continuation of an unconstitutional violation in such an important matter.

Finally, Sir, I consider it your duty to ensure that the elections are held in accordance with all laws and so thus prevent any challenge arising from the election to the National Assembly of any person who does not satisfy these eligibility criteria.

Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram

This is more than an academic matter. The constitutional provisions are intended to ensure that our legislators are loyal to Guyana and Guyana alone. A similar situation arose in Jamaica recently where politician Mr Daryl Vaz gave up his naturalized US citizenship in order to continue in Jamaican politics. That those who seek to make laws for the citizens of any country must be willing to submit themselves to those very laws at all times is almost superfluous to state.

The permissiveness that characterised previous parliaments has led us into the present state of non-governance and lawlessness. We must not allow the same mistakes again. The time to start holding our next batch of parliamentary representatives to account begins now.

Under the theme ‘Working for a Better Tomorrow,’ the PPP/C Manifesto for the 2011 elections is a mix of distortions, untruths and misrepresentations, wishful thinking or no thinking at all. The two-page introduction, written by the presidential candidate Mr Donald Ramotar seems signally disconnected from the rest of the 43-page document.

Not content with the half-true contents of the Manifesto, Mr Jagdeo, the PPP/C’s presidential candidate for the past two elections showed that he still does not believe that truth is a virtue. His capacity for inventiveness, make-believe and contempt for the intelligence of his audience guaranteed that he authored the most astounding untruths of the Manifesto launch night when he told the audience that the PPP/C government had only just paid off a US$300 million loan for the PNC’s failed hydropower project!

Not only was it deception for the Manifesto to choose 1991 as its reference point when the PPP/C was in fact elected in the fourth quarter of 1992, but some of the selected information both then and now are fictitious and or fabricated. GPL line loss was not 50% in 1991 nor is it less than 30% now (page 13). GuySuCo does not produce 30 MW of bagasse power at Skeldon – a Wartsila diesel powered engine does – and the current external debt is not “approximately US$800 million” – unless for the economist Mr Ramotar and his economic team US$800 million and US$1,111 million are “approximately” the same!

The Manifesto boasts of the growth of the economy over the past nineteen years. It does not bother with the inconvenience that a substantial portion of the growth comes from the re-basing of the economy in 2009, an exercise which even a half-decent economist knows makes long-term comparisons meaningless. Of course it would have been too honest to expect the Manifesto to tell us that the exchange rate of the US Dollar has sunk 65% since 1992; or that the domestic debt has climbed from $18 billion in 1992 to $103 billion at June 30, 2011; or that the cost of electricity was $12 compared with $54 per KW currently; or that greenheart was $85 per board metre compared with $350 now.

Mr Jagdeo and now Mr Ramotar repeat ad nauseum that 96% of revenues were consumed in servicing debt “when they took over,” and it is now 4%. They should read the 1993 Budget Speech in which the first PPP/C Finance Minister Asgar Ally referred to “scheduled debt service obligation” and not actual debt servicing. And if they look at the 2010 revised figures, they will see that debt-servicing to revenue is not 4% but 13.3%.

What is also striking is that Mr Ramotar’s ‘vision’ for the next five years does not add a single new idea to the corruption-laden projects of Mr Jagdeo’s last term. So we have:

1. the expensive and untested Chinese laptops that will run us into billions;

2. the Amaila hydropower project which will earn us the award for the most expensive hydropower in the world, guaranteeing that electricity rates will remain prohibitively high;

3. the tourism hospital which Mr Jagdeo and his friend will import from India;

4. the Low Carbon Development Strategy that is neither low in carbon nor developmental in nature; and

5. the fibre-optic cable.

Mr Ramotar shows a dangerously limited understanding of democracy and the constitution when he promises local government elections within one year and “the strengthening of the local government ministry to oversee local government bodies.” The man seems blissfully unaware that that is the purview of the constitutionally required Local Government Com-mission which his party in government has refused to establish, and that Article 79 requiring Parliament to provide criteria for allocating resources to the regions has not been given effect to.

Despite our border problems with Chavez’s Venezuela and Bouterse’s Suriname, or the imperative to resile from Jagdeo’s excursions with Kuwait, Libya and Iran, Mr Ramotar does not think that foreign policy deserves a mention in 43 pages.

But he dreams that in five years he can transform an education system – known as much for a few exceptions like Ms Dev, as for its drop-outs and the creation of a functionally illiterate population – into one that is “world class and globally competitive.”

That race and race relations for the PPP are the imagination of a few aging malcontents is evident from the failure of the Manifesto to recognise those issues or to acknowledge the International Year for People of African Descent.

One wonders whether the leaders of the private sector in attendance, including Clinton Williams, Norman McLean, Ramesh Dookhoo and others, noticed that nowhere is the private sector or the manufacturing sector mentioned in the Manifesto. Good for them.

But labour too got no mention and one is left to wonder for how much longer the Jagdeo-Nadir $800 per day minimum wage will drive the pay policy of the PPP/C. No mention of the depressed communities or efforts to stamp out corruption or to integrate the corrupt elements in the informal economy into the tax-paying formal economy.

Governance too is treated by omission. And for a man who was nurtured in the ideologically obsessed Marxist PPP, Mr Ramotar’s Manifesto does not even mention the model of economic philosophy which his administration will pursue.

Whoever wrote the section of the Manifesto on Information and Communication Technology (page 22) must have been smoking something. How in Edghill’s heaven’s name can Guyana produce 25,000 high-quality jobs over the next five years in computer engineering and software development? Perhaps we will import them from India or China as we will do for our tourism hospital.

Women who make up 51% of the population, children, the elderly and the family get one page in the Manifesto at page 36, that includes a commitment to a comprehensive review of the NIS. The PPP/C’s mismanagement of the NIS under the chairmanship of Dr Roger Luncheon for the past nineteen years has placed the NIS at grave risk with outflows far exceeding inflows – three years earlier than the 2006 Seventh Actuarial Study had feared.

And youth who make up 46% of the voters share one page with sports and culture, although culture is noticeably missing in the plans for the next five years.

One can draw analogies from Alice in Wonderland or Aesop’s Fables, but perhaps the most appropriate assessment of the PPP/C manifesto was offered by their own former minister, Dr Henry Jeffrey, who told the nation on ‘Plain Talk’ last Sunday that he could not vote for the PPP/C on the basis of this Manifesto.