With its first meeting scheduled for this week, the new Chairman of Parlia-ment’s Standing Com-mittee for Constitu-tional Reform, Attorney General Anil Nandlall SC, says that this country’s citizenry can expect changes they need and proposed by the end of this PPP/C Government’s term in office.
Underscoring that the process will be a “people driven” one, Nandlall said that he does not want to pronounce on specific deliverables but the nation can be assured that the committee will work tirelessly to ensure the changes proposed by the majority are made.
“The PPP is delivering its promise to, as the occupant of the seat of government, to facilitate and resource the process. We have to wait to see and know what the people want. That is what we promised,” he told the Sunday Stabroek in an interview.
Soon after the PPP/C took office last year, Nandlall had outlined the legislative agenda for his ministry and said that reform of the election laws and constitution were high on the agenda.
He had told the National Assembly that his ministry will spearhead wide-ranging reforms, including legislative reforms to the electoral process to make it “stronger, more transparent, more accountable and to ensure that it is manned by persons of high integrity and professional ethics, so as to prevent the electoral machinery from being hijacked by political fraudsters, who cannot win government through the will of the people.”
Last week, he said that the body should have its first meeting before the end of this month and the first task at hand would entail the creation of a work programme, in relation to the achievement of the objectives of the committee which, according to him, “ultimately is to push an agenda of possible reforms to the constitution.”
He said that given that all political parties during the last elections had campaigned on promises of pressing for constitutional reform, he did not anticipate much difficulty with the committee doing its work and the reforms proposed gaining the needed numbers for passage.
“All the political parties in their manifesto promised constitutional reform, so in that regard, I do not anticipate much difficulty. Significantly, since constitutional reform is by its very nature a bipartisan process, in the sense that no singular party in the house has sufficient number of votes to effect any important reform, it is expected that [the] work programme will be a largely consensual one. All the political parties in their respective manifestos fashioned their own approaches on how the process will unfold. The task of the committee will have to be to bring those approaches to the table and carve out a consensual process. That will require constant input and reporting to our respective principals. Once that is agreed upon, then the next step is to execute the programme,” he said.
For the PPP/C, he said that its approach remains, as outlined in their manifesto “one that is driven by public consultation.”
Asked how it will be executed, he replied, “How this will be executed will have to be ironed out, in terms of if the guiding force is going to be a national commission established or a committee itself.”
“Would experts be incorporated into the process, and if so at what stage? Would this vehicle established, travel the country or would people be invited to meet at an established place to be determined? All of these matters will have to be discussed and agreed upon,” he said.
“Speaking from the perspective of the government, that is precisely why we are putting the process to the people. The people must be the driving force from our stand point. The PPP/C and the government are simply stakeholders in the process, like other stakeholders. It is not going to be a government dominated and driven process… It would be premature to speak to deliverables since the process would be driven not necessarily by the government,” he added.
The other members of the committee are Priya Manickchand, Charles S Ramson, Sonia Parag and Sanjeev Datadin for the PPP/C and Khemraj Ramjattan, Raphael Trotman, Amanza Walton-Desir and Nicolette Henry for APNU+AFC.
