Dear Editor,
President Donald Ramotar’s decision to prorogue Parliament has, understandably, met with much criticism by the parliamentary opposition parties, namely APNU and the AFC, both of which, together, enjoyed a one-seat majority in Parliament. They have unabashedly used that one-seat majority to take majority control of all the key committees of Parliament in addition to the key positions of Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House.
One would expect that as the party that won the plurality and just missed the majority by a single seat, there would have been some kind of accommodation and political maturity shown by the combined opposition to the new dispensation which gave them for the first time in our parliamentary history majority control of the House. The PPP has always enjoyed a parliamentary majority, even during the days of colonial rule when despite not winning the majority of the votes in the 1961 elections, still managed by virtue of constituency representation to get a majority of the seats in Parliament. In that election, the PPP won 47% of the votes but got 57% of the seats in Parliament.
The situation today is quite different, thanks to a new constitutional provision in which seats are allocated on the basis of a combination of proportional representation and the constituency or regional seat allocation. The PPP/C won 32 of those seats, the APNU 26 seats and the AFC 7 seats, giving the combined opposition one seat more than the PPP/C.
This one seat difference between the PPP/C and the combined opposition is the root cause of much of the turbulence in the body politic, as the combined opposition saw that new parliamentary configuration as an opportunity not only to wrest control of the legislative arm of the state, but to interfere in the work of the executive. It refused to approve huge sums of money in the national budget that were earmarked by the executive for major capital projects, and a number of line items under the recurrent programme also failed to get parliamentary approval, including monies allocated for Amerindian and hinterland development and student loans.
But it was the decision taken by the minority parliamentary opposition party, the Alliance for Change, to move a no-confidence motion, however, that triggered a turning point in the parliamentary impasse that the country experienced since the commencement of the Tenth Parliament. The first attempt at a no-confidence motion was made by the APNU with the support of the AFC against Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee but it failed to gain traction after the speaker failed to take action to disallow the minister from speaking in Parliament, much to the disappointment of the parliamentary opposition.
In a sense, it was a contest won by the executive as the President failed to heed the call for the removal of Minister Rohee from his cabinet and his portfolio as Home Affairs Minister. The opposition again sought to proceed with another no-confidence motion, this time directed against the President himself and his PPP/C administration. The motion was tabled by the AFC and from all indications would have been carried if put to a vote in Parliament.
The move by the President was therefore pre-emptive, since it became abundantly clear that the motion would get majority support which would have resulted in fresh elections within three months after the passing of the motion. Prior to the reconvening of Parliament, the President gave notice of his intention to prorogue if important pieces of legislation were to be aborted in favour of the no-confidence motion. He also announced the holding of local government elections by the end of the second quarter of 2015 if the opposition parties desisted from a pre-meditated course of action. But that was not to be, and the opposition parties gleefully made their way to the chambers of Parliament.
The opposition parties and some others supposedly from civil society, appeared upset over this decision but the question that should be asked is whether any other responsible President, having regard to situation he was confronted with, could have done anything differently. Would the AFC or the APNU, hypothetically speaking, having won a plurality allowed themselves to be, as it were, sitting ducks and allowed themselves to be plucked out of office by any minority party or combination of minority parties?
In politics, two or more minorities do not make a majority as the opposition wrongly seems to believe. Such an infantile and simplistic application of a mathematical concept does not hold water in the realm of political praxis. It is therefore both misleading and incorrect to argue that the President’s action was undemocratic and unlawful. The President acted within the framework of the constitution and the rule of law in the same manner that the AFC acted within the framework of the constitution to move a no-confidence motion. Why is the action taken by the opposition parties correct and that of the PPP/C wrong when both parties acted within the framework of the constitution?
The President did what any responsible President would have done and in the process opened the doors to fresh thinking on the way forward. One can only hope that good sense will prevail and the opposition parties would use this new window of opportunity provided by the President to find common ground on how to advance our social and economic gains and preserve our democracy.
Yours faithfully,
Hydar Ally
