Dear Editor,
In this country, there has never been a successful Third Force. In retrospect, even Peter D’Aguiar’s party, UF, who formed the first coalition with Forbes Burnham in 1964 to effect the British and American plan to oust Dr. Jagan, thought that he could exert control over the PNC and Burnham by becoming a member of the government as Minister of Finance. But it was an ill-conceived plan, and quite literally destroyed the country for decades probably even to today. D’Aguair was not a corrupt man, he was just unable to keep Barnham on the straight and narrow. Anyway, the 1964 election results saw the PPP winning 24 of the then 53 seat parliament, the PNC winning 22 seats, and the UF winning 7 seats. It was part of the plan of the British and the Americans, who promised Dr Jagan independence only if he agreed to Proportional Representation in 1964, and so since the combined coalition seats of the PNC and the UF were 29 seats of the then 53 seat parliament, the British removed Dr Jagan as Prime Minister by force, and placed Burnham in power.
The results of the 1968 elections showed the level of distortion which the fraudulent elections would cause in this country until 1992, when the Carter Center persuaded Hoyte to follow the Carter formula and count the votes at the place of poll. In the 1968 elections, the PNC won 30 of the 53 seats, the PPP winning only 19 seats and the UF winning 4 seats, and in the 1973 election, it was worse, Burnham took 37 of the 53 seats in the parliament, the PPP winning 14 seats and the UF winning only 2 seats! In the fair 1992 election the PPP won 32 seats, 24 seats MORE than the previous rigged election and the PNC won 31 seats, 23 LESS than the previous election. That was the level of the rigging i.e. 23 seats, but it also importantly showed that the difference in support between the two parties was only one seat. That is essentially what obtains even to this day. A one seat margin.
In 1992, the WPA took one seat and the UF took one seat. Here for the first time, we had a minority party making the government since neither the PPP nor the PNC had the 33 seats necessary to form the government. But with Nadir leading the UF, anything could have happened behind the scenes, but my research does not yield any open coalition between the PPP and the UF in 1992, hence I’m not sure if they could have formed the government legally. Without the CCJ it would have been useless. Editor, let’s fast forward to 2011, by which time the public’s tolerance for corruption was exhausted. That election showed again that there is a place for a Third Force of approximately 7-13 seats, which was similar to Peter Aguiar’s UF 1964 parliamentary allocation.
In the 2011 election, the PPP won 32 seats, 4 seats less than in 2006, the PNC won 26 seats, two more than in 2006, and the AFC won 7 seats, 2 more than 2006. So for the second time since 1964, the PPP failed to win the majority of seats in our National Assembly. And frankly, it was the opinion of Sir Fenton Ramsahoye that even though, according to our constitution, GECOM had declared [Donald] Ramotar the President, since he had the most votes, it was Ramsahoye’s opinion that he had no legal right to form a government, and if the AFC understood their role as a Third Force, they should have immediately voted “No Confidence” and demand to be a proper Third Force, with the legislative power to moderate and control the PPP. They did not. The AFC had the entire ball game in their hands in 2011, and they did not have the knowledge or intelligence to play the power game they won.
And I saw the deficiency, Editor, in 2005. Being a staunch supporter of a Third Force, I joined two young Guyanese, Trotman and Ramjattan, to set up what is now the Alliance for Change. They had no office and so I begged my friend, Christopher Ram, to let us use his Boardroom for the initial meetings. I even asked Mr. Ram to do me the favour and join the meetings. In time, I brought to that table not only Christopher Ram but Ramon Gaskin, Fenton Ramsahoye and Asgar Ali as supporters of the Third Force. To go through what went on, turning all of us off from the AFC, is the subject for another letter. But in the end, we were right, since in my own case, I totally disagreed with almost everything they seemed to be planning.
For example, I thought that since we were seeking to dethrone the PPP, the stronger of the two main parties, that the first presidential candidate should have been Ramjattan and not Trotman. Let it be enough to say that I was right. In 2001, the PPP won 34 seats, the PNC 27 seats, WPA/GAP 2. In 2006, after the AFC was launched, the PPP actually got stronger with 36 seats, up 2 seats, and the PNC got 22 seats, down 5 seats, and the AFC 5 seats. So Editor, the AFC took all of their seats from the PNC and made the PPP stronger. One can only speculate now what would have happened if Ramjattan was the Presidential candidate in 2006. To undo what I saw in the AFC, I agreed to join the One Guyana platform of the PNC to see if I could balance the ticket, it did not help much.
So what must the Third Force do in Guyana to establish good governance? They should not seek executive power and be absorbed and consumed by the bigger party. It is a sad commentary on the caliber of men that the Third Force parties have attracted, which yielded no leaders to function on behalf of the people of Guyana! An effective Third Force with 5 to 7 seats should only be members of parliament, made up of people of integrity who are seeking no position in government and are not in politics to get rich, and vote against anything which they visualize is not in the interest of our people. Perhaps Ramjattan may be such a man, but not his colleagues. In addition, and more importantly, they must block the passing of all national budgets, except perhaps to pay the government workers’ salaries, until their demands to remove corruption and mismanagement from our governance, and a commitment to force the rebuilding of institutions of government which are all on life support now.
The situation of our current politicians and their oligarchs being some of the wealthiest persons in this country, maybe even in this hemisphere, simply because they are looting the treasury uncaringly, has to stop, since in doing so, they are depriving the poor Guyanese people of their birthright. At this time the pleadings of the Jacob Rambarran case, Appeal 91 of 2014, which is a constitutional matter but not heard for 9 years, and which was written by Sir Fenton Ramsahoye, must be heard. The case seeks to establish that to form a government the numerical winner declared by GECOM as President, must THEN obtain a mandate from the people and that means 51% or 33 seats in the case of Guyana’s National Assembly. I will not rest until the CCJ renders a decision in this matter, it’s too important and has led to too much nonsense passing for parliamentary practice in this country for too long.
From 1980 to 2005 when the CCJ was formed and we became members, this country allowed the Burnham 1980 constitution to make the Guyana Appeal Court the final court for Guyanese which was totally under the control of the political executive, denied all Guyanese of “due process” and mutilated the quality of our legal jurisprudence in this country for three or four decades. And even today, any criticism of the effectiveness of our judicial system is a reasonable comment. After 1980, many perverse legal decisions rendered in Guyana would have probably not been allowed to stand, since if our Judges made decisions which could have been overturned by the Privy Council in Great Britain, accompanied by the usual scathing comments against such decisions, which the Privy is famous for, our level of jurisprudence would have improved immensely. All of the above examples show that any power sharing models will fail and fuel the already massive wave of corruption ruling this land, but if my study is correct, you don’t have to be the President to rule Guyana. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of people in a society, over the course of time, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that justifies it” – Fedric Bastal. Editor, it must stop!
Sincerely,
Tony Vieira
