If President Donald Ramotar wants to represent change in and modernisation of the Guyanese political fabric, one of his first priorities must be to put a rein on the type of propaganda with which the PPP has been historically associated. All political parties attempt to project a favourable view of their policies and programmes, but in the modern world this can no longer be achieved by way of deception and the fact that such an approach continues to be attempted in Guyana speaks volumes of the state of mind of our political elite and of the condition of the reporting establishment.
Immediately preceding the last elections, I wrote two columns on the nature of propaganda, which claimed that over the decades and right up to the last elections, the PPP has been involved in the crudest form of this art, which deliberately sought – and to a large extent succeeded – to deceive the Guyanese people as to their real condition. Even if this kind of crude manipulation was acceptable in the 1960s, given developments in reporting and communications technology in our times, it should no longer be possible or acceptable. Today propaganda has become spin: a biased presentation of events in one’s own favour. Rarely is it, as it has been in the past, the barefaced denial or creation of those events.
The PPP/C’s most recent excursion into this most questionable form of propaganda has come with its claim that by demanding that the speaker of our National Assembly should be someone from the opposition benches, the opposition parliamentary parties are varying from the practice of Commonwealth parliamentary democracies where the opposition is the majority in parliament. “In those countries,” the PPP/C claims, “it is the ruling party whose nominee gets the position while the deputy goes to the opposition.” Had the PPP/C any respect for the Guyanese people and believed that it was in a context in which its utterance would be properly scrutinised, it would not have made such a statement.
New Zealand has the archetypical Westminster type government and as in Guyana, the speaker is elected by the house immediately upon the assembly of a new parliament. When the government has a sufficient majority, the process is relatively simple but in cases of minority governments or where the government majority is small (since a party would lose the vote of the person who becomes the speaker), the matter can become extremely political.
The first contested election of a speaker of the New Zealand parliament was back in 1891, when the elections of 1890 did not produce a clear result and the incumbent speaker had lost his seat. When Parliament assembled in early 1891 the election of a speaker was bitterly contested as a test of who would be the government. William Rolleston from the Premier party was proposed on the grounds that the matter of the speaker should not be made a party question. Many expected Rolleston to be easily accepted but another proposition for Major William Steward of the Liberal Party was made. The matter went to a vote and the Liberals won and Steward became speaker. The government resigned and the Liberal Party took power.
After the next election, the Liberals were now in some difficulty over the Speaker since the pre-1891 speaker had been re-elected. Steward was not considered an effective manager of the House but could not be prevailed upon to retire. However, with cross-party support, he was defeated in the elections for speaker by the pre-1891 incumbent.
In 1923 another occasion for a contest materialised when the incumbent speaker was defeated in the election of 1922 at a time when three parties (the Reform, Liberals and Labour) were vying for power. The prime minister had a slim majority and he wanted to avoid losing a valuable vote, so chose an opposition member as his candidate for the speakership. This move gained the support of the Liberals but the Labour party put up its own candidate. The Liberals voted en bloc with Reform, Labour lost and New Zealand gained its first New Zealand-born speaker.
Given that a party loses the vote of the person who becomes speaker, the 1993 election in New Zealand might have resulted in a ‘hung’ parliament if the majority party took the position, so the prime minister put forward a disaffected opposition Labour MP as speaker. Since the Labour party was unlikely to win if another election was held, it agreed to the move and one of its MPs became the speaker.
As another example, the Maldives achieved independence from Britain in 1965 and became a republic in 1968. After a somewhat chequered history, which need not detain us, in 2005 political parties were legalised and now number about a dozen. Of some interest, the president, members of parliament and other key officials are required to be Sunni Muslims. In 2008 a new constitution, which included protection for a range of civil liberties, was finally put in place. Under the new constitution, the president is directly elected for up to two five-year terms and a Majlis (parliament) of 77 seats, with members elected from individual constituencies to serve five-year terms, was established.
The country’s first multiparty presidential election was held in October 2008 and the leader of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) with 54% of the votes won the final run-off elections against the leader of the Maldivian People’s Party (DRP). However, in the parliamentary elections that were held the following year, the DRP won 28 seats, while the MDP won 26, the DRP ally, the People’s Alliance (PA) took 7, and independents won 13 seats. The DRP’s strong showing led to the election of DRP member as the speaker and a PA member as the deputy speaker.
These small examples demonstrate that there is absolutely no merit in the PPP/C’s case that the opposition holding the speakership is unacceptable in Commonwealth-type democracies. If anything, what experience teaches is that the system allows for a variety of options. In this the 21st century, the PPP/C’s propaganda needs to be more sophisticated, whether its aim is holding on to the speakership or anything else. It should however take note that in the Maldivian case the president’s party lost both the speakership and the deputy speakership. Although this is also possible and is already being mooted in opposition circles here, the PPP/C can better make an historical case that this should not be so.
