In February of this year President Irfaan Ali addressed Parliament telling the assembled MPs that his government’s vision was one of “inclusion”, and that he wanted “regular high-level consultations” with representative bodies to address key issues. All that can be said is that the citizenry has seen precious little of that in the past twelve months. As it is he ended this year not in the spirit of the “oneness” and “unity” that he is so fond of proclaiming, but in one of division and disunity.
The sorry tale of the passage of the Natural Resource Fund Bill through Parliament is symptomatic of the sickness which afflicts most of our political elites, including the governing party. They suffer – in a purely metaphorical sense – from a Cyclopean complaint: they see the nation and its problems through only one eye. There was the President defending this highly flawed proposed legislation in impassioned terms on Wednesday, saying that unlike its predecessor which the coalition government had passed, this one would be making its way through the debates. “[W]e are not an unconstitutional government that is rushing the Bill through,” he said. “The Bill is in Parliament for a full debate.”
Citizens are left to wonder whether he really believes what he says. In the first place the Bill was gazetted on December 15th and its first reading was held the following day, while debate was scheduled for eight days later. Where was the space for representative bodies to study its provisions? Why bring it now during the Christmas season when the public mind is distracted by more festive matters, and has less time to devote to weighty issues? And this is a particularly weighty issue in need of careful perusal and mature deliberation. Why the unholy rush?
Worse yet, in Parliament his party would not accede to the Bill being referred to Special Select Committee for review as requested by the opposition, rather than being taken through its second and third readings at breakneck speed. If the government genuinely believed the Bill was beyond criticism in terms of the Santiago principles and the advice of experts with experience of Sovereign Wealth Funds, why the need to behave as if it is trying to win a Formula 1 race?
But then that is the problem of the Cyclopean complaint: only the sufferer sees all the answers, and only the sufferer speaks for the nation. This is rationalised in terms of the specious argument which the Vice President has enunciated, that the government has been voted in by the electorate to take decisions. Not bad ones, surely, it might be remarked, in addition to which it has to be pointed out that the party, like the coalition before it has only the slenderest of majorities; almost half the nation did not vote in its favour. Yet this half appears invisible to those in office.
President Ali’s formulation of this principle during his address was that in the “elections, the people of Guyana reposed in the government the confidence to implement th[e] agenda.” That agenda, he went on to say sought to and has already started the journey to create among promises made in the manifesto, 50,000 jobs, house lots, more disposable income to the people, better health care, improved educational opportunities and infrastructural and technological development across the country.
Manifestos by their very nature deal in generalities, and most of them promise improved education and health care, infrastructural development and the like. The issue is, however, not just whether these things are done, but how they are done. The matter of the management of this country’s oil wealth is the most critical issue of recent times. The PPP/C manifesto had promised new Natural Resources legislation, justifiably so, given the serious shortcomings of the one passed by the APNU+AFC government. But one might have thought that given the history of the deficient nature of that particular statute this government would have taken the advice of Mr Eric Parrado, a former manager of one of the world’s most successful Sovereign Wealth Funds, who we reported had emphasised to the coalition government the importance of full consensus by the society on its fiscal and legislative framework. It seems they paid him little heed. And now the present administration is doing likewise.
On Monday the Trades Union Congress, the Transparency Institute of Guyana and Article 13 called on the President and the government to delay the scheduled vote on the Bill. A petition signed by 64 Guyanese asking for a deferral was also lodged with Parliament by Policy Forum Guyana. Then came the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce which also called for a postponement so dialogue could be held. They were all ignored.
Is it that the President did not mean what he said earlier this year when he told Parliament he wanted regular consultations with representative bodies? Or is it that those who raised queries did not count as representative bodies because they were invisible to the government with its restricted visual span? Whatever the case, it can only be wondered why they don’t stop the dissembling, because so many among the electorate do not take their asseverations seriously any longer. They are putting on public display their obsession with unilateralism and control.
But they weren’t the only ones two days ago to display their Cyclopean limitations. There was APNU putting on a disgraceful display in Parliament to try and prevent the second reading of the Bill. They were fully justified in attempting to argue for it to be referred to the Select Committee, but all the other antics − the noise, the banging, the blowing on whistles in order to try and drown out Minister Ashni Singh and above all else Ms Annette Ferguson’s abortive attempt to seize the Mace so the proceedings would be halted, were inexcusable. The floor of the National Assembly is not a children’s playground; it is where the nation’s business is conducted, and the nation expects its business to be taken seriously.
But here again the PNCR – since it was mostly members of that party which were involved − saw only with one eye; it played to its hard-core constituency and ignored the larger citizenry which would have included many of those who had voted for it in 2020. In other words, probably a majority of the public would have viewed its outrageous behaviour as a kind of political atavism, not a sign that the party was trying to leave behind its early unsavoury ways. Last year the party dug a hole for itself from which it will find it difficult to emerge. But if it wants to begin the difficult process of rehabilitating its image and getting the public to learn to take it seriously, it will have to be careful about every move it makes.
There was no physical action, short of something unthinkable which could have prevented the second reading in the National Assembly, so at a practical level what was all that nonsense about? The worst that APNU+AFC should have been contemplating was a walk-out, which they did do eventually in any case. But then in conjunction with the Cyclopean limitation afflicting our major parties, they also suffer from myopia in a metaphorical sense; they are incapable of seeing further than the short term.
While they may express it in different ways, both sides appear incapable of making out the horizon, and seeing the consequences of their actions and decisions. The current government has shown no inclination, let alone ability to look at the long term. This kind of myopia could be disastrous for all our futures, and whether or not it was elected with a one-seat majority, it has no right to refuse to listen to those who are better able to see the kind of deleterious consequences further down the line which we might not be able to reverse. And it also has no right to refuse to listen to the rest of us either; a democratic election which gave it a minuscule majority does not mean it has carte blanche to do as it pleases.
And as for the opposition, it has to start listening to what civil society voices have to say, irrespective of whether they are sympathetic to the party or not. It has to start honing arguments and alternative policies and speaking for those segments of the populace who are being ignored at whatever level. That is the job of an opposition. And it especially needs to look to the future to create a realistic vision of how it can return to the democratic fold and become a responsible party. Utterly undisciplined scenes in Parliament just simply won’t cut it. Those are not examples of politics in action; they are examples of hooliganism.
