Dear Editor,
No doubt I am one of many whose concerns and fears have been heightened by our President Granger finding unacceptable the second list of nominees put by our Leader of the Opposition (LOP) from which our President could choose our next Chairman of GECOM. This adds to concerns and fears about the different but related matter of how, with the greatest of respect, our President appears to have ignored for over a year the recommendation of the then Judicial Service Commission (JSC), to all appearances seeming to wait out the retirement of the then Chief Justice and Chancellor to create a JSC apparently of his own liking.
For my position to be clear let me first join in extending congratulations to them, our fellow citizens who have taken the oath to serve us at their high levels “without fear or favour, affection or ill will”, most unnatural for us humans especially so for us Guyanese. Our prayers must be with them. But this is not only an issue of the individuals who have been appointed Judges, Chief Justice, Chancellor – it is no less a question of procedure and process, procedures and processes which seek to keep and enhance the faith and trust of our different and differing people in eventually attaining our aspiration of great social cohesion. The most important ones constrain the highest person in our land, our President.
Our LOP has shared with us his great reluctance when as our President he received the recommendation from the JSC to appoint then attorney Mr. Bovell-Drakes as a Judge, someone who had been known to be from his youth a leading person in the PNC and its organs. Could a Justice Drakes get beyond the reality and perception of being biased in favour of the PNC? President Jagdeo resisted his appointment but in time acceded to the advice that he should conform with the provisions of our Constitution which allowed him to return the name to the JSC with his written concerns about Mr. Drakes for their reconsideration. When the JSC (much the same one seemingly spurned by our current President) returned the name of Mr. Drakes, President Jagdeo conformed and appointed Justice Drakes. It is such acts of conformity and faith, often contrary to our better judgement, which build trust and encourage and enable greater social cohesion.
In these matters (as in other nations) our practices and law, both in letter and in spirit, arise out of resolving frightful experiences – moreso in our Guyana where we, fragments from six different peoples, have been working at accommodating our different sentiments, experiences and expectations. Our accommodations to our insecurities in the appointments of the Chairman of GECOM and of Judges are now under great strain.
Perhaps I am extra sensitive and anxious about these accommodations because besides being crucial to the continued convergence of our peoples I feel them as part of me.
I started my political career participating in a protest calling on then Chairman of the Elections Commission, Justice Harry Bollers (the father of my workmate colleague and friend, and a friend of my most important benefactor) to resign and go. I stayed a part of the various manoeuvrings and meanderings which led to the procedure by which Mr Collins became Chairman of the Elections Commission and which procedure served us well with little or no differences nor questions until now. The strength of this Carter formula lies in what our President and our LOP implicitly say to us, the electorate, in the list(s) presented by the LOP and the acceptance of someone or the total rejection by the President. Arrangements in politics can hardly be perfect. Our electorate should be pondering why our President could not find that he could live with some one of the twelve named persons as Chairman of GECOM.
Recall the run-up to the 1997 elections of December 15, the rising intensity of unrest as election day drew nigh. Our National Poet Martin Carter had died a week or two before that election. Ms. Janet Jagan, then my Prime Minister and our Presidential candidate, in seeking to attend the funeral of her colleague from the early days was advised on her way to the interment at our ‘Seven Ponds’, to pause a while at the Office of the President. She said to me that she was getting a feeling of a re-run of the 1957/61/64 period, in that while the PNC supporters eventually tolerated the PPP win in 1957, things began to heat up when they contemplated the PPP winning again in 1961.
When the PPP/C won the elections of 1997, there were two charges on which the “slow fire and more fire” disturbances were predicated – that the PPP/C had won by rigging, and whether rigged or not our system was unfair because the PPP/C would always win. This was the background to Caricom putting to us, the PPP/C, what became known as the Herdmanston Accord : that the parties would amend our Constitution to ameliorate the insecurity of the minority, by avoiding the perception that rule by majority could become dictatorship by the majority. Amongst other things, we would continue to observe the Carter formula, the LOP would be granted veto rights over the appointments of the Chief Justice and the Chancellor, and the President would appoint as Judges such persons as are recommended to him by the JSC. Elections were to be held after a given menu of amendments would have been enacted, hence the early elections of 2001. It may not be too early for Caricom to provide some wise counselling.
For a number of reasons not many of us were with President Janet Jagan that fateful night when she accepted the Herdmanston Accord. Acceding to the Herdmanston Accord took two years off our term after the 1997 elections. It was difficult to accept but we put people and country first. We of the PPP/C have been making contributions which are not trivial, to our aspirations for greater social cohesion and keeping our nation together.
Yours faithfully,
Samuel A. A. Hinds
Former Prime Minister and former
President