Last week Speaker of the National Assembly Raphael Trotman instructed Clerk Sherlock Isaacs to convene a sitting of Parliament on November 6, which he refused to do. Parliament went into three months’ recess on August 10 without a date being fixed for it to reconvene, and incredible as it must appear to other Commonwealth democracies, after no less than forty-eight years of independence in this country there is still no accord on the correct interpretation of the Standing Orders indicating who exactly has the power to call a sitting in such circumstances.
Mr Isaacs’ view is that the Speaker does not have the power under the Standing Orders to name the date for a sitting, and as we reported in our Thursday edition, he apparently consulted some of his Caricom counterparts on the matter. It has to be said that there was not complete concurrence among the views he had received up to that point. The Clerk of the Trinidad and Tobago House, for example, considered that Mr Trotman’s request should be accommodated, and the government could take the matter to the courts, while the Clerk of Jamaica’s Parliament offered the opinion that the Speaker could adjust the date for the House to meet, but could not set it.
In a letter published in this newspaper and others yesterday, Guyana’s longest serving Clerk of Parliament lent his support to Mr Isaacs’ interpretation, and cited the two previous occasions when a Speaker requested that a Clerk call a parliamentary sitting and was denied. The first occurred in 1963 prior to Independence, when the PPP was in office, and the Speaker was R B Gajraj and the Clerk, E V Viapree. In that instance too, Viapree did not accede to Gajraj’s request. Nine years later there was another example, this time with the PNC in power. On that occasion it was the Deputy Speaker Derek Jagan of the PPP who requested Mr Narain to arrange for the Assembly to convene. The Clerk advised Jagan that he was “not empowered to give notice for the Assembly to meet,” and did not comply with his instructions. In short, Mr Narain’s account gives the precedents for interpreting the Standing Orders.
For his part, Mr Trotman said that in addition to consulting Mr Isaacs he had also canvassed the opinions of two former Speakers, namely, Mr Sase Narain and Mr Ralph Ramkarran on the issue, and had concluded thereafter that the Standing Orders had already settled the matter of when the National Assembly should meet if a date had not been fixed. Mr Ramkarran, who served two terms as Speaker, had already made his views known publicly in the columns of this newspaper. Without going into the niceties of his argument in his first discussion of the subject on October 19, he said the Standing Orders required that if the National Assembly was adjourned without a date being named at the time of the adjournment, pursuant to the authority of Standing Order 8(1) the rule that it should be adjourned to the “next sitting day” applied. Having failed to reconvene on October 11, the day following the ending of the recess, “he [the Speaker] should lose no further time and should convene the National Assembly at the earliest opportunity,” he wrote.
As for the precedents, Mr Ramkarran said the practice of arriving at a date and then reconvening which “grew up over many decades… ought never to have been allowed by the current or past Speakers, myself included.” In his more recent column of October 26, the former Speaker went on to expand this by saying that it was ultra vires the power of Speakers, former and present, for the National Assembly to be convened at the request of the government.
In his recent press release, Speaker Trotman wrote that securing agreement on a date appeared “elusive to even impossible”; by default therefore this leaves the matter with the government, whose Chief Whip has been unreachable for the past few days, and whose President limited himself to the unhelpful communication on Wednesday that Parliament would meet in the near future. AFC Leader Khemraj Ramjattan has called the Clerk “insubordinate,” and has given expression to a view which no doubt finds resonance with many sectors of the public, namely, that “by nomenclature [the Clerk’s] position is clerical,” while up to the time of writing, Mr Granger’s opinion had not been received. However, APNU had said it would support an amendment of the Standing Orders, although in a kind of Catch 22 situation this would necessitate the reconvening of Parliament first.
In the middle of all this on Friday it was announced by Speaker Trotman that the Mace – which has more than symbolic significance – along with the case in which it was housed, had been stolen. Aficionados of Guyana’s turbulent political history would have cast their minds back to 1963, when as related by Mr Narain, the government had the Clerk remove the Mace so the sitting demanded could not be held. However, subsequently, Clerk Isaacs said that the symbol of the Speaker’s authority had been taken for cleaning and would be returned shortly, along with a new case.
This statement notwithstanding, it still sent the twittering classes into overdrive, suspecting as they did, ulterior motives. It is not as if they do not have some basis for their suspicions, since this particular logjam, like so many others which have preceded it, is not really only about legalisms and the correct interpretation of the Standing Orders. Had this been so, the problem could have been easily overcome.
While the man and woman in the street have only the vaguest grasp of the Standing Orders, if any grasp at all, they have a very good apprehension of what has brought us to this point. This is all about the AFC’s no-confidence motion, which APNU has said it will support, and which if passed in Parliament would require a general election within three months. Quite clearly, the government is not anxious to face the electorate so soon, and is resorting to all kinds of stratagems to avoid having to do so.
The result is that we are now in the utterly ludicrous position of having no local government elections, because the ruling party is afraid of the outcome; no general elections, because the ruling party is afraid of the outcome; and no parliamentary sittings, because the ruling party is afraid of the no-confidence motion and its consequences. Can the PPP with its long history of fighting for free and fair elections through the post-1968 Burnham years, really look at itself in the mirror and say with truth it brought back democracy to Guyana? The PNC rigged elections; the PPP avoids them. What right does Freedom House have to point fingers now?
In particular, how can it claim it is running anything approaching a democratic polity when it will not even arrange for the National Assembly to meet? And this, it might be noted, is in a situation where it is in a minority in Parliament. In other jurisdictions, it should be said, this would attract a label quite the opposite of ‘democratic.’ Furthermore, it has exposed itself shamelessly. Who will believe it now if it denies that clinging on to power by any means it can is its main impulsion for political action, and that any other motives it might claim pale in comparison?
Last week Speaker Trotman said we had a constitutional crisis. He is right.