On Wednesday March 5 the lead story in the Stabroek News addressed the response of President Irfaan Ali and some members of his Cabinet to a statement credited to a number of local organizations associated with advocacy in matters of national interest including some that had to do with issues of accountability in various sectors including the extractive sector.
It is clear from the posture that it has struck on various issues, from one time to the next, that the incumbent political administration is not particularly tolerant of having its feet held to the fire, that posture, one feels, having derived from a held-over triumphalism from its eventual accession to office following the events of the March 2020 general elections and after that from the realization of the country’s earliest oil and gas and the government’s receivables.
From these two sets of circumstances, one feels, has arisen a tendency on the part of the political incumbents to cock a snook at their critics, whomsoever those may be and whatever the issue in question. Truth be told, It smacks of the sort of political triumphalism that could, sooner rather than later, cause the Irfaan Ali administration to come to believe that it can walk on water. That is not a good sign.
Contextually, the recent frontal attack by the President and members of his Cabinet on those civil society groups that have called for greater accountability and transparency in the management of the public purse, amounts not just to an unacceptable display of executive arrogance but, arguably, something of an unseemly pushback against the right of individuals and institutions to demand good governance.
When a President and his Ministers dare to ‘square off’ against sections of the citizenry on a matter as important as public accountability in circumstances where this, historically, has been a serious weakness in the governance process, it points to a usurpation of prerogative that far exceeds the authority vested in government. Contextually, we need to remind ourselves that not many weeks ago, Education Minister Priya Manickchand made public some particularly glaring transgressions of the tender process in the handling of a particular tender procedure, for which, as far as this newspaper is aware without, there has been no word on whether or how these discrepancies are to be corrected.
It is worth pointing out that the charge of ‘political bias’ leveled against those civil society groups that signed on to the call for greater accountability on the part of President Ali’s administration appears to take no account of the fact that many of those groups are widely-known for an unwavering evenhandedness in their public pronouncements. This certainly raises questions as to whether, for all its noises about the role of critical comment as an element of the democratic process, the political administration may not find itself cocooned in a bubble of triumphalism and edging towards the outer limits of its tolerance of legitimate criticism.
Here, it should be stated that it is for President Ali himself to set a tone of official moderation in his government’s response to public criticism, not allowing itself to be pushed to the edge of quixotic extremes, causing it to lash out at every critical voice that is raised in either reprimand or concern.
Rather than seek to temper the poor taste and petulance that lesser functionaries might adopt, here is the country’s Executive President seemingly joining the din, alongside members of his Cabinet.
President Ali, himself, rather than address the substance of the accountability issue, opts to take aim at ‘individual organizations” including those which he describes as ‘”one-man entities” whose pronouncements of public accountability, he suggests, should be assessed on the basis of their ‘numbers’ rather than on the veracity of their assertions. The point to be made here, of course, is that the President’s handlers appear decidedly indifferent – as they have been in other occurrences of public importance – to their responsibility to separate him from such folly.
If it is entirely true that the issue of the mishandling of the public purse has long been one of the favoured themes of accusations by our political administrations against each other, it is a travesty, no less, that rather than move to close such loopholes and take such actions as might contribute to the eradication of those practices, the whole matter of public accountability has been reduced to a pantomime of carefully rehearsed charges and countercharges that do no more than fuel protracted and vacuous political sword-fencing, a thick mist into which the substantive charges eventually disappear. It is a strategy that has unfolded sufficiently repetitively to suggest that it is intended to serve no more purpose than that of a short, sharp shower that seeks to respond to the unwholesome conditions of a hot day.
The President seeks to establish a link between the authors of the ‘accountability’ pronouncement and “organizations that had nothing to say after the no confidence motion” as if the two are even remotely connected. The reality is – and President Ali as a Cabinet Minister in a previous PPP/C administration is doubtless aware of this – that the issue of deviant behaviour by officials in matters of accountability has never really been confined to any particular political administration. Indeed, historically, serious and altogether valid questions continue to be raised in this regard so that President Ali has to find a way of accepting that the democratic credentials of his administration insofar as its right to govern is concerned cannot be equated with the prerogative of immunity from public reprimand in matters that have to do with public accountability.
