President Ramotar has now completed two years in office with a complement of ministers largely inherited from his predecessor. Nobody could accuse him of putting his stamp on his term thus far; in fact, rightly or wrongly the public perceives him as too timid and too cautious for that – put less euphemistically, not quite his own man. The most visible person in the Office of the President is not the Head of State, but Cabinet Secretary and HPS, Dr Roger Luncheon, who operates in a kind of duumvirate with Ms Gail Teixeira.
There has been no adumbration of policy from President Ramotar; no clear statement of what his government hopes to achieve this year (the small army of advisors swarming around Vlissengen Road notwithstanding); and barring a few occasions, not much emanating from him that is new or different. Even some of his ministers, if not quite invisible, are certainly not voluble on the subject matter of their portfolios, although of them all, Attorney General Anil Nandlall is the one who could least be categorized as a shrinking violet.
There is no overarching vision, no grand architecture in which government policy finds shelter and no attempt to share with the populus in any coherent way how the administration sees the future here evolving. As it is, the President and the government operate mostly in negative mode, grumbling about the opposition and the past. In fact, it is the obsession with trying to squash every novel occurrence of which they disapprove into the mould of the past which makes it difficult for them to come to terms with reality, or to seek creative solutions to our problems. From the electorate’s point of view, it is also very tiresome.
The government also comes across as clandestine in its dealings, with information about major projects coming sputtering out, usually after having been leaked or revealed from external sources, as in the case of the airport expansion. Even after a project has been exposed, it is well-nigh impossible – the Marriott Hotel being a case in point – to extract any information from official sources on relevant data to which the public is entitled to have access, and all the administration does is simply reinforce the perception that it engages in secret deals.
If President Ramotar has accomplished nothing in this department to distinguish himself from his predecessor in office, neither has he shown any preparedness to make a break with the immediate past by confronting the thorny question of corruption. As it is, his party has obstructed the setting up of oversight bodies, like the Public Procurement Commission, although the government which he heads has finally named an Ombudsman. The appointee is a commendable choice, although as said in last Monday’s editorial, whether he will be able to function as the legislation intended will depend on whether his office is adequately resourced, among other things.
Then there is the matter of the Auditor General’s office, which lacks the personnel and resources to discharge its functions as it should; whose head, it is alleged, lacks the requisite qualifications for the post he holds; and whose deputy is in a conflict of interest situation. The first line of defence against corruption is well-resourced, autonomous institutions – the very thing that President Ramotar’s administration has set its face against, and which lends support to the accusation that there is no intention to try and address the problem of this particular pestilence.
In the meantime, newly built roads crumble away, bridges collapse and members of the police force (among others) continue to supplement their wages with the now almost institutionalised ‘raise.’
Absolute control is an obsession with the PPP, and the Head of State has not deviated from the party line in this regard. As a consequence, certain bills to which he should have appended his signature he has declined to sign into law. The classic example is the last of the local government bills, which while it has considerable flaws is certainly an improvement on what obtains at present. If it went onto the statute books it would remove certain critical powers the Minister of Local Government holds in relation to local government bodies, and place them in the hands of a Local Government Commission; however, the President and the governing party are not prepared to relinquish their stranglehold on the various local authorities.
Under our current constitution, the presidency is a platform for real power, quite independent of the governing party, in this case the PPP. As former president Mr Bharrat Jagdeo discovered, he could govern according to his own whims and fancies without reference to Freedom House, which it is thought he bypassed not infrequently. The only time a president needs his party is if he is seeking its nomination for re-election. It was suggested at the time of Mr Ramotar’s accession to office that he was a one-term president; however, the lure of power is such that one can never be sure that he might not change his mind.
Be that as it may, if the current incumbent in the Office of the President decided to cut the umbilical cord to Freedom House, and make a few independent and imaginative decisions, there would be nothing his party could do to stop him, constitutionally speaking. However, the general consensus is that President Ramotar is too reticent and unadventurous a man to go this route, and as such 2014 is unlikely to see him emerging from the shadow of his predecessor.
It is Mr Jagdeo who exercised the power of the presidency to the fullest, and also – as mentioned above ‒ made sure that he had his own people in cabinet in addition to those who were on the PPP Executive Committee. President Ramotar is no longer the PPP General Secretary, and appears to have no one around him whom he has chosen, or whom he could rely on for sensible advice outside the group-think framework of Robb Street. It is no surprise, therefore, that he is perceived, correctly or otherwise, as doing others’ bidding.
It is not that he hasn’t had opportunities to assert himself where the cabinet was concerned, at least. He has one now in the light of the scandal concerning the survey permission granted in the New River Triangle. If nothing else, it has exposed Minister Robert Persaud as unsuitable for holding responsibility for the environment, at a minimum, and it would require no great reflection on the President’s part to see that that part of the portfolio is in need of a rethink.
Even a modest cabinet reshuffle would give the President more of an independent identity.
