I am convinced that Guyanese on all sides of the current constitutional quarrel know that what is unfolding is an interactive pantomime largely being staged by the coalition government, which was caught off guard by the no-confidence vote but wants to hold on to government, and two main reasons are in the public domain as to why it wants so desperately to do so. Firstly, the play allows it to retrieve some political dignity among its supporters, for, having been given good notice and very badly managing the Charrandass Persaud affair, it now needs to show its supporters that it is as, if not more, intellectually nimble and able to play hardball politics as its opponents. Secondly, should it lose the upcoming national elections, it will leave its main constituency in a worse political position than it found it in 2015, and the no-confidence motion deprived it of the time it needs to be prepared to ‘win’ the 2020 elections, so it wants to retrieve that time and is doing so by playing games with the law and at the elections commission.
The minute the president presented the unsound notion that only judge-like persons could be members of the Guyana Elections Commission, it was clear that the regime’s sights were set upon capturing the commission, and this became a reality with his unilateral appointment of the chairperson. Regardless of what the Constitution may have intended in terms of the independence of the Commission, the process that was established to achieve that intention was extremely flawed and was exploited by the government.
I have argued before (SN: 27/06/2018) that Guyana is replete with a kind of formalism that suggests that if a behaviour is logically possible even if practice shows differently, once a claim is made that it exists, it does! As a result, ‘Successive governments have packed constitutionally-declared independent positions in the public service with high, even active, party officials and supporters and require that we accept that …these persons can easily manoeuvre between partiality and independence, when a mere glance at their behaviour cannot fail to indicate that to accept this construct would be at best unadulterated naivety.’