Chairman of a previous Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC), Ralph Ramkarran SC on Sunday said that the current CRC process should be scrapped and core issues such as presidential powers and inclusive governance addressed.
Also a former speaker of the National Assembly, Ramkarran said that the mandate of the current process was mostly a replication of the 1999 process and therefore a better plan would have been to evaluate that constitutional reform process and then formulate the way forward.
“While some bodies have not been established, others are not functioning either at all or optimally and many recommendations have not been implemented,” Ramkarran wrote in his Sunday Stabroek column.
He said this begs the question; “Is the current CRC going to merely revise and/or second guess the work of the CRC of 1999? If so, is a CRC required at all? An inquiry into the adequacy of the 1999 reforms, and their efficacy, would have been more appropriate. Since the work the CRC 2022 is required to do has already been done by the CRC 1999, the current constitutional reform process should be scrapped or amended to deal with the real issues that have troubled Guyanese since at least 1980.”