It is not very useful to accuse someone of doing nothing without suggesting what can be done. Therefore, this week I wish to suggest to Prime Minister Samuel Hinds a way out of what he presented as his major concern about executive shared governance. He claimed that “shared government (at this time) would only transfer the dissension and contentions in Parliament into the Cabinet room. The government could be paralysed.” But let me begin by saying that this statement is founded in a major misconception of what precisely is taking place in Parliament. As an example, let us consider the dissensions and contentions that occurred during the recent budget process.
It does not take much to recognise that the quarrel over the actual budget cuts was the occasion and not the cause of the budget war between the government and the opposition. The actual cause of the dispute was the refusal of the government to provide meaningful opportunities for the opposition – and indeed other stakeholders – to make their inputs into the budget.
Nowhere has this been seen clearer than in the current dispute between Mr Christopher Ram and the Guyana Power and Light hierarchy about the nature and consequences of the cuts the opposition has made to the GPL allocations. The complicated nature of their discourse suggests that these are matters for the conference table, where closer scrutiny can be made of the contesting argument. Unfortunately, no such opportunity was provided by the regime and thus we are now being provided with what is at best an informative but sterile discourse.
Of course the PPP had its own reasons for maintaining this kind of quarrel. Firstly it was seeking opportunities to demonstrate to its supporters that the opposition is unreasonable and bent upon destruction. Secondly, as the prime minister said, it wanted to demonstrate to its people that shared governance would lead to cabinet failure and would not work. However, my own feeling is that the PPP has again underestimated the perceptiveness of its own supporters, many of whom recognise and are voicing opinions as to where the fault lies, and so has been forced to make concessions on the formation of the tripartite budget committee that is to begin looking at next year’s budget in around July.
I begin thus not because I wish to restate what has become obvious to all but because it lays bare the prime minister’s misconception. For since the budget dissension in Parliament was not essentially about the budget content but about the right of the opposition to be properly consulted some time before the budget is completed, by definition, a shared governance arrangement would have eliminated this possibility for it must provide the opposition full participatory opportunities.
Indeed, this continuous bickering has overshadowed the fact that even without sensible collaborative opportunities, the government and the opposition do not violently disagree about a great deal. After all, the opposition has shaved less than 15% from a budget of nearly $209 billion. What would have been the outcome had there been proper participatory opportunities?
It must not be thought for one moment that I am claiming that these kinds of procedural quarrels are the only ones (although I believe that so far they have constituted the major proportion of the quarrels between government and opposition) or that it would be plain sailing in any kind of shared governance arrangement.I agree with David Schmitt that “Despite the apparent difficulties faced by societies dominated by two main ethnic groups, it should not be assumed that they are inevitably ungovernable” (“Problems of Accommodation in Bicommunal Societies,” Conflict Quarterly, 1991). Or can only be kept on track where one group dominates the other.
To aid the process of governance, at the macro level we might have, inter alia, national voting systems, such as transferable voting arrangements, that could help to foster the potential for coalition or the development of more neutral third parties. Greater regional and local autonomy could also help to minimise ethnic conflict where proper provisions are in place to protect the minorities in particular locations. Super majorities could be required for certain important levels of decision making. National tie-breaking mechanisms, which may include respected neutral individuals or countries, may also be helpful (Ibid).
At the micro level, today one of the most common measures to help with the possibility of internal dissension is the establishment of written coalition agreements. In some cases these contain both procedural and policy measures.
In introducing their coalition agreement, the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties, which fairly recently had to form a coalition at Westminster itself, had this to say: “We have found that a combination of our parties’ best ideas and attitudes has produced a programme for government that is more radical and comprehensive than our individual manifestoes …. Three weeks ago we could never have predicted the publication of this document. After the election, of course, there was the option of minority government – but we were uninspired by it. Instead, there was the option of a coalition in the national interest – and we seized it.”
Other internal conflict management mechanisms include an inner cabinet containing a few senior cabinet ministers which is not issue-specific and which is stable over time; issue-specific cabinet committees which may include ministers and senior civil servants; a coalition committee, consisting of party leaders, that is permanent and has a stable membership; parliamentary leaders of the coalition parties; party summits consisting of one or several leaders for each coalition party, etc.
What is noteworthy is that the longer the coalition environment exists the less effort is made to explicitly document these procedural arrangements. For example, in the first coalition government in the Netherlands in early 1963 some 45% of the 3,350 word coalition agreement was taken up with the general and specific rules governing coalition workings. However by 2000 1% of specific rules were contained in the 36,000 word coalition agreement. Indeed the emphasis appears to be more on policy, which in 2000 took up 98% of the document compared with only 52% in 1963 ( Wolfgang, C Muller and Kaare Strom (2003) “Coalition Governments in Western Europe,” Oxford University Press).
The most viable examples of ethnic accommodation have occurred in economically advanced areas and our kind of societies are usually difficult to manage. However, rather than sitting and hoping for the arrival of utopia in a situation of dominance, the PM would do best to urge upon his colleagues the type of measures that have been suggested. Only then would he be facilitating the path towards a moral society in which his dream of our holding hand across ethnicity and taking care of each other could possibly materialise.
