We have reached a pivotal point in our political history – perhaps. We will find out for certain tomorrow. On Tuesday President Donald Ramotar announced that Parliament would reconvene on November 10, and for good measure told the nation that it was his intention to have local government elections in the second quarter of next year if “urgent” government business was allowed to proceed unimpeded. It was this caveat, in fact, which harboured the real point of the address. In our Wednesday edition we quoted Mr Ramotar as saying, “[If] I am provided with reasons to believe that the parliamentary opposition intends to disrupt government’s business by forcing a debate on their no-confidence motion, I resolve to respond immediately by exercising my constitutional options to either prorogue or dissolve parliament paving the way for [the] holding of general elections.”
So one way or another we might be looking at a general election – perhaps. Since the no-confidence motion is on the Order Paper, and since it has been reported that the combined opposition has met and agreed on a common strategy in relation to it in the House of Assembly, it must be presumed that the debate will go ahead, barring some unforeseen circumstance such as an unanticipated Speaker’s ruling, for example. If it did go ahead, and if it were passed – and there is every reason to suppose it would be – then a general election would have to be held within three months.
However, in a fit of pique, the government, as noted above, is likely to pre-empt the debate, one of its options being to dissolve Parliament. While there is no good reason why it should not defend its record and then go down to a no-confidence motion as sometimes happens in other Commonwealth jurisdictions, we would still end up in the same position following a dissolution as we would have done if a no-confidence motion had been passed, ie, there would have to be a general election. In such circumstances the government would have four months to play with instead of three in terms of naming the date, but the President would still have to name Nomination Day as well as Election Day at the time of dissolution.
But – and it is a big but – when addressing the nation President Ramotar gave an alternative to dissolving Parliament, and that was to prorogue it. Prorogation is not something the public here is familiar with at all, and in fact the politicians do not know a great deal about it either since it has not been employed here in their direct memory. It involves the suspension of Parliament for a period of up to six months, during which time the President will be able to govern by proclamation.
As Mr Moses Nagamootoo of the AFC outlined at a press conference on Thursday, at the end of the six months the head of state could then if he chose dissolve Parliament, giving him potentially another four months of rule by ukase, so to speak. In other words the country could, theoretically speaking, face the prospect of almost a year of unvarnished dictatorial rule. What would be infinitely worse is if the government decided to prorogue for another six months. It will come as some surprise to the public no doubt that while all this would defy the spirit of the constitution, it would nevertheless be technically legal under it.
During a prorogation there could be no local government elections any more than national ones, no sitting parliament and no democracy in any of its accepted senses. This would be in a situation, it must be emphasized, when there is no emergency of any kind which might conceivably justify such a method of proceeding. Paradoxically, it would exhibit a parallel with 1953 when the constitution in that instance was suspended by the colonial authorities at a time when there was no emergency or civil disorder of any kind.
How prorogation could even be considered an option by the ruling party, therefore, is something to be marvelled at. But then this is a deracinated PPP which has forgotten its origins, forgotten what it stood for during its years in the wilderness, and forgotten its early leadership. It is, quite simply, inebriated with power.
Other than making it possible to imbibe the elixir of power for a while longer, it is difficult to understand exactly what the ruling party thinks it would have to gain by a prorogation. It would invite a storm of criticism from inside the country, and make it a pariah outside. While it may or may not bother itself too much about what Caricom would have to say, it would find that it would destroy its democratic credentials in the Commonwealth as well as Western Europe and North America, if not parts of South America as well. Has the ruling party which met on Friday seriously debated whether a few more months of power are worth the international consequences? Or is it that it doesn’t care because it has aligned itself with a number of nations which are less than democratic? Furthermore, in a general sense it is an incautious direction in which to move, if only because the results would be quite unpredictable, and events would play out in a way that the party had not contemplated.
Needless to say a decision to prorogue would in addition preclude Freedom House from pointing fingers at the PNC’s undemocratic record, and touting itself as having restored democracy to Guyana. How is it going to distinguish itself now from its long-time adversary, especially in the eyes of its own supporters? Or is the idea to issue a few popular orders as a demonstration of how much better it would be to live under a PPP government with an overall majority than one in a minority in Parliament where gridlock holds sway? If so, the PPP is deluding itself since at this stage no one would be deceived by its ruses and political games, and its openly authoritarian stance would override any other consideration.
There has been a kind of unspoken consensus among many members of the public that we can’t go on as we have been doing; the political Gordian knot would have to be cut. It is not so much that Guyana is ungovernable as that it is ungoverned. The government has forfeited the respect of the electorate, and while it retains legitimacy in a technical sense since it is not illegally in office, it has surrendered its moral authority and along with that has lost its psychological confidence. In the face of the no-confidence motion – and even long before – it has seemed to flounder. Far from being able to exercise the control it is so obsessed with, it has lost control, not even attempting to bring its affairs somewhat back into kilter in the face of the ever mounting number of scandals with which it is beset.
And now it wants to avoid what it sees as the humiliation of being brought down by a no-confidence motion, despite its earlier asseverations to the contrary. But if it is not going that route, at least when the PPP/C Members of Parliament walk into the Chamber tomorrow it should be in the knowledge that the President is dissolving Parliament, not that he is proroguing it. Everything else aside, the latter would be to drag this country back to an earlier era, and the vanguard party, as it likes to think of itself, would become the retrograde party.
