Dear Editor,
We do not tire of repeating that we are a special people. Gifted in our own ways despite the displeasures of the past. Of the professional corps with which we are endowed, our teachers (and we offer felicitations to Minister of Education Priya Manickchand for honouring our teachers) and then, in abundance, our lawyers are renowned for their quality.
Perhaps the first serious book I read at the ripe age of fourteen was The law of unlawful possession, larceny, and receiving by Guyanese legal scholar Alfred Victor Crane. From Crane’s time, through the Luckhoos, the Massiahs, Bishop, JOF Haynes, Gonsalves-Sabola, to the Pollards still with us, our legal minds have made their outstanding contribution to local, Caribbean and international jurisprudence. Justice Oscar Ramjeet, who has worked in the region could name you at least two dozen eminent jurists who were in the field there.
So, there is no question as to the quality of the lawyers. How then does one explain the unreformed condition of the corpus of our laws, mostly dating from the colonial era and a few fingled with to make minor changes. There is a word that occurs to describe the condition to which we have reduced our lawyers. It is ‘inutility,’ uselessness. They seem to have been deprived of the structures needed to ensure the process of unceasing modification and modernisation that we see in many other places. This is not only unfair to the practitioners, but punitive to the population which suffers the anachronisms and the sense the legal system, ossified, refuses to evolve.
Yet, since independence, our two governments have had some of the best legal minds in the places serving in administrative roles. But a Doodnauth Singh as AG has not sufficed. It seems that what is needed is a structure dedicated to law reform. The present AG, Anil Nandlall, a lawyer destined to insert himself in our legal history for his contribution to the clarification of constitutional issues, is head of the Law Reform Commission, we read. He clearly needs a staff of draftsmen and other specialists to move things along.
So, for our lawyers to escape their image of glorified ‘bicycle light’ misdemeanour defenders, the Bar Association needs to be associated with development, begun since Burnham’s days, and still not advanced appreciably.
The above is to contribute to the point of this. The coming election campaign serves to elicit the programmes of each contender. It has to go beyond the usual vapid desiderata. We need specifics if we are not to fall again in the trap of simply imagining that the PPP or APNU enters the arena with a wand with which all our suffering will be made to disappear. The changes need to be made in some essential domains.
1) Administrative reform: Since the creation of the regional system by the PNC in the seventies and the expansion of the public service there seems to have been little done. One regards as very good news the fact that passports can now be uplifted, as in France, at police stations close to the population. This is a good change that Mr Rohee has brought. We wrote a letter on this some months ago. We expect that birth certificates could be made available to locals and to the diaspora by an easier system. It took Saphier Hussain of the new Independent Party to point to the possibilities in the legal system for us to realise we were not, as brought up to believe, at the whims and mercies of the ministers of this or that. The entire system of service delivery, ministry by ministry, institution by institution, needs to be reviewed and revised.
- Tax reform: We were promised some time ago, a review of the fiscal system. It is outdated and oppressive. It is barbarous that a car is considered a luxury item and overtaxed. The fiscal incentives regime and tax thresholds need to be updated. The cry about VAT revealed that many of the criers had a poor idea of modern methods of tax recovery. The opposition has in Carl Greenidge, a gifted and experienced mind in development economics and budgetary matters, including revenue collection, and needs to do something in the parliament to make it work.
- Parliamentary reform: Recommendations already made.
- Constitutional reform: One does not underestimate the strategic cunning of the APNU team. Perhaps, like the PPP, they like the current constitution, as it allows them into government after gaining a mere plurality. But comprehensive reform is needed. Attorney Hussain’s New Independent Party has a place in parliament.
- The entire investment authority needs to have re-visited its management. Despite the hard work Brassington has put into NICIL (some deals like Marriott are impossible to sell on a mere feasibility study), we need expertise to avoid selling our resources on frivolous terms and dispensing to friends and co-conspirators.
The AFC already has an excellent framework document for economic planning, done in part by Tarron Khemraj and others.
In other words, the manifestos, as they emerge, have to address these issues in a serious and detailed manner for any party to be taken seriously. Besides the usual generalisations, a timeline needs to be set for each project of reform and committees with citizen involvement set up to pilot the projects. To function as if we are still in the fifties and sixties is not only to insult ourselves (the predecessors were even better in some ways) but it is to fail to continue the work started by our families a generation or two ago.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
