The Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) has called for a single development plan for the country that doesn’t change with governments and wants constitutional reforms that will see the restoration of executive functions to a Prime Minister sitting in Parliament with only certain constitutional functions performed by a President.
In his address to the 130th GCCI annual awards ceremony at the Marriott Hotel last night, the President of the Chamber Nicholas Deygoo-Boyer also flayed the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) for its failure to hold general elections within the constitutional timeframe and said there must be changes to the composition of the body and the process for the selection of its Chair.
Excerpts of Deygoo-Boyer’s address follow:
Politics
In the Political sphere on Dec 21, 2018 the opposition called for and won a no confidence motion. After initially seeming to accept the outcome of the motion, the government challenged the outcome first in Parliament, second in the High Court where they lost in both places, then third in the Appeal Court where they found a favorable outcome, and finally the opposition challenged the outcome in the Appeal Court and won in the Caribbean Court of Justice. An election that should have happened in March 2019, will now take place in March 2020 due to the failure of preparation of the Guyana Elections Commission. This cannot be overlooked, as leaders in the business world, if any unit we ran failed its mandate, there would have been serious repercussions and investigations launched into why there was a breakdown in the unit NOT being able to deliver upon its mandated function within the prescribed time; at GECOM it still continues to be a mystery as to how the organization failed in its mandate to be prepared for a March 2019 election having known that an early one would be called after the No Confidence Motion. Unfortunately, that type of failure has to be laid at the feet of those in captaincy of the organization such as its Chief Executive Officer and the Commission. Given that, the saga on House to House Registration exposed how flawed the current composition of the GECOM Commission is, Guyanese need a better way forward, and not to be held hostage to the battle for power.
Our Plan for the Development of Guyana
The GCCI believes that in order to prepare our country for a new era in its history, we need to have a single all encompassing, nationally bought into development plan, not a plan that will be thrown out at successive elections. This transformative plan must address the structural issues in our economy that will allow us to be a shining example for our region and for the world in the case of how small states deal with windfall natural resource exploitation. (For context here Rystad Energy expects that the projected Government Revenue from the 14 discoveries in the Stabroek Block will be above US$120B.) To this end, we have come up with a 10pt plan that we believe will address the major structural issues in our economy. Those 10pts in no particular order are:
1. Energy
2. Local Content Legislation & Sovereign Wealth Fund
3. Infrastructure
4. Healthcare
5. Education
6. Governance
7. Security
8. Trade & Taxation
9. Diversified and Value Added Economy
10. Labour
Governance
● Constitutional reform to change the following ○ Composition of Commission of GECOM
○ Process for selection of the GECOM Chair
○ Term limits for Constitutional office holders
○ Split of Parliament in to a lower and upper house, with the lower house being elected at local government elections
○ Limiting Powers of the President to a Constitutional Function such as in Trinidad and Tobago, and placing the executive functions with the Prime Minister
● Changing the structure of Ministries so that Permanent Secretaries are in charge of operations, and Ministers are in charge of policy and direction.
● Improvement in the judicial system through increased training for police prosecutors, and IT system implementation
