Dear Editor,
It boggles the mind how, after a constitutional process that began in 1999 and lasted for more than two years, in which the opportunity existed and was taken for us to totally rewrite our constitution, one can still speak, as Mr Vishnu Bisram does, of the present constitution being a Burnham/PNC constitution (‘No party has a right to foist a constitution on a people,’ SN, February 14). This becomes even more alarming when we recall that since those reforms the PPP/C has persistently claimed that Guyana now has the most advanced constitution in the Caribbean! If the intent is to name constitutions after the government in power at the time of their ratification then the more sensible designation must be the PPP constitution. Unless one is starting tabula rasa, most constitutions contain elements of their predecessors.
What has Mr Bisram succumbed to: error or subterfuge? The answer is obvious! If one removes the Burnham/PNC epithets, Mr Bisram’s letter is almost totally devoid of content (negative or positive) and propaganda value.
For example, it is not the Burnham/PNC but the PPP constitution that does not allow for shared governance. Since the present constitutional reform was completed after the “return to democracy,” there is no question that it was foisted upon anyone by fraudulent elections. Carl Greenidge and I are claiming that it is the PPP and not the Burnham constitution that is unworkable and unacceptable. Carl Greenidge was long gone when this new constitutional enterprise was being executed in 1999. The framers of this new constitution that retain the now unacceptable aspects of the Burnham constitution had expert advice and were sufficiently versed about our previous constitutions and as such, must have rejected notions of returning to them.
In this context, whether or not the Indians in the Burnham government and the Africans in the PPP/C’s regime were or were not tokens or Mr Greenidge and I enjoyed the benefits of office in that period are totally irrelevant.
The present PPP constitution was completed in a more-or-less free and open political environment in which all of us (including Mr Bisram and I ), in government, opposition and civil society, either directly or through our representatives could have attempted to make an input to change those aspects of the Burnham constitution that we now find abhorrent. Yet throughout that process, given the importance we now attach to issues of shared governance, participation, etc, so far as I am aware, not much was made of these aspects of the Burnham constitution by anyone.
It does appear that if Burnham is not exhumed periodically, Mr Bisram and his ilk find it extremely difficult to spin a decent propagandistic tale. From his contribution, my article ‘Majority rule is acceptable to no one’ (SN, February 13) appears not the causus belli but the casus belli and therefore he must know that I have made extensive suggestions for constitutional reforms, although I do hold that returning to parliamentary systems of bygone days will be retrograde.
I believe that Mr Bisram’s contributions would be more honest and meaningful if he were to shake off the more perverse aspects of his PPP world view, which is immobilized outside of a context that demonizes Burnham and the PNC. This would perhaps also facilitate his answering of the only sensible question in his missive: “how do we get a form of government that is acceptable to everyone and truly representative of all ethnic groups?”
Yours faithfully,
Henry Jeffrey
