After the results of the 2011 general elections and the consequences for the mathematics of the National Assembly had become clear, a fairly sizeable constituency of Guyanese roundly applauded the verdict of the electorate. In fact, in the public response to the outcome of the 2011 poll, the retention of the presidency by the ruling party was far less politically significant than the fact that the opposition had secured a majority in the National Assembly.
What made the 2011 one-seat majority significant was the fact that, for the first time in the country’s post-independence history, no single political party could ride roughshod over the National Assembly. The electorate had spoken for an altered political culture that embraced the relevance of parliamentary debate, the crafting of consensus and arriving at understandings that had to do with the good of the nation rather than the whims of the political party controlling the Parliament. In essence the electorate had spoken for giving the National Assembly a relevance that went beyond the formality of its mere existence. In other words, while the 2011 electoral verdict may not have resulted in a euphoric national response, it certainly created an acute awareness of the possibilities that had arisen from the outcome of the poll.
Not ever having found ourselves in that kind of political situation previously, that constituency that applauded the opposition one-seat majority made what they believed to be entirely reasonable assumptions about what it might mean for the parliamentary process and for the political process as a whole. Frankly and with the benefit of hindsight, some of us simply never stopped to take account of the various likely permutations of the one-seat majority that beyond our own post-elections optimism.
In recent days we have been learning a good deal more about events that came close to scuttling the extant parliamentary arrangements and the attendant termination of the tenure of Mr. Gocool Boodhoo as Chief Elections Officer. Before that and long before the nation’s Tenth Parliament was even up and running we were to witness an ominous outburst of political bickering over the eventual election of a Speaker of the National Assembly. Those early exchanges were portents of what was to come. The executive’s patently obvious discomfort with its loss of control of National Assembly was manifested in a propensity for crying foul and accusing the political opposition of using its slender majority to prevent the ruling party from governing the country. On the other hand and by way of justifying its own posture the joint opposition declared that it considered its function in its new-found position of parliamentary majority to be to render the executive more accountable, to secure a measure of real involvement in the parliamentary decision-making process and to ensure enhanced transparency as far as the management of the affairs (particularly the financial ones) of the state were concerned.
The next major political manifestation of the dynamics of the opposition majority was to surface during the parliamentary debate on the 2012 budget. That debate featured a pitched political confrontation inside the National Assembly and budget cuts imposed by the political opposition. Apart from their substantive effect of placing limits on government spending, the budget cuts were significant in another important way. In the eyes of of many those cuts marked a new-found empowerment of the political opposition. Nothing like that had happened before in our post-independence history. Later on we were to witness several profound paradoxes…like the government trotting out employees of the state-run National Communications Network (NCN) to bemoan the likely loss of jobs on account of the budget cuts and the various Cabinet Ministers pressing their staff into service in picketing exercises against the budget cuts. Politics in Guyana had been stood on its head!
In sum, the hoped-for consensual parliamentary culture which a limited constituency had been hoping for has failed to materialize. In their understandable eagerness to see, hopefully, the beginning of the end of the culture of seemingly irreconcilable divisiveness that had blighted our politics for decades, they had overlooked altogether the influence of habit. The incumbent political administration regarded the opposition one-seat majority as a condition close to power-sharing since what it meant was that laws could not routinely passed at the behest of the ruling party as had been the case historically.
Some of the other spinoffs of the political opposition’s one-seat majority have included tendencies towards brinkmanship as manifested both in the less than thinly-veiled threats that have surfaced about snap elections and even less thinly veiled ones about the use of the President’s prerogative not to give assent to Bills that do not find favour with the government’s side of the House.
What the nation’s Tenth Parliament has done is to provide a sobering object lesson in the nature of our political culture. Perhaps it may be too early to suggest that the opposition one-seat majority has failed. Certainly, it has thrown up many valuable lessons and transformed the Parliament into a far livelier place of business. A Minister and his entire stack of proposed legislation has been sent packing and we are witnessing for the first time exercises in genuine parliamentary lobbying.
Here in Guyana the government has actually been making clear its desire to lobby an opposition in order to secure passage of a Bill in the National Assembly. Those of us who live here and who understand the senseless and uncompromising political behavior that has traditionally been par for the course are aware that some of what we are witnessing amounts to near miracles.
We are left to look down the road – so to speak – to seek to determine whether, perhaps, we may not learn some important lessons from the experience of the nation’s Tenth Parliament; whether, for example, we may not, in the fullness of time, come to embrace virtues like consensus and accountability and whether our political leaders might not see good governance as extending way beyond absolute political control. What we know – for the time being at least =is that our political leaders have little trust in anything beyond the assurances that they derive from being in control, for not having to share power or, better still, responsibility for governing Guyana. Even if, this time around, we may have been disappointed, we would at least have been given an opportunity to hope.
