The would-be debate that degenerated into a débâcle in the National Assembly last week was preventable but not entirely unpredictable. It occurred largely because the opposition perceived that the agreements reached between the administration and the social partners in the aftermath of the Lusignan and Bartica atrocities were not satisfactorily reflected in the text of the motion laid before the house.
The incident said a lot about the administration’s sense of insecurity and siege mentality in dealing with emergencies in general and with the current extremely serious crime situation in particular. It also showed how lightly the administration was prepared to discard the goodwill gained by engaging the political parties and social partners who fully and faithfully participated in the consultations. Having stumbled fortuitously on a context for consensus, the administration found it expedient to use the opportunity to reassert its superiority over the rest of society.
The incident reflected a similar mentality when the People’s National Congress-Reform attempted to have a motion on the Lusignan massacre debated in the National Assembly last month. The People’s Progressive Party-Civic used its majority to thwart the motion which, apart from denouncing the atrocity, called on the administration to implement a definite plan of action to counter the crime crisis.
This time around, the administration foiled the opposition’s attempts to amend the motion to include the need for equitable access to the state media by parliamentary parties and references to Article 13 of the Constitution which deals with the principle of inclusiveness. The opposition felt that to omit those elements would make a mockery of three weeks worth of deliberations that went into the national consensus.
What provisions of the proposed amendments could have so alarmed the administration that it felt compelled to ignore them? How sincere is the administration’s commitment to Article XXII of the Charter of Civil Society for the Caribbean Community and Article 13 of the Constitution of Guyana?
Last week’s performance in the National Assembly illustrated how important it was for the ruling party to retain its complete control of the state media which it cynically employs as a partisan platform for political propaganda. The siege mentality is manifested most in the meticulous mobilisation of ministers and party members to appear on serialised programmes such as Perspectives of the Week and Operation Restore Order on the state-owned television. By these means, the administration wages an unrelenting, one-sided campaign that seems more committed to the vilification of the opposition than to the construction of a national consensus on countering the current crime crisis.
In the aftermath of the Lusignan massacre, for example, the state media reported that the Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon announced that the administration “will not be engaging the political opposition and those who have already been judged and condemned for their unbalance and their proclivities for supporting and promoting the things that divide us where the issue is concerned.” Later, he indelicately referred to the leader of the opposition Mr. Robert Corbin as “making himself a fool” and accused the opposition parties of “two-facedness.” This sort of rhetoric is not only grossly ungracious but is itself unbalanced, unbecoming of the dignity of the Office of the President and unhelpful to social solidarity at this time.
It came as no surprise in the midst of the troubles last month that Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee was obliged to complain that, although the administration had been pushing for the Crime Stoppers Programme to be implemented, it has not received the private sector’s support. What sort of response did he expect?
Unless members of this administration change their mindset, modify their speech and stance, open the public communications media to the people’s elected representatives and reach out sincerely to other citizens of this country, it will be difficult to build an enduring national consensus to ensure public safety, economic prosperity and social cohesion.
