After a lengthy address to the National Assembly following a meeting with key members of Government and Opposition last Wednesday evening, Speaker of the National Assembly Raphael Trotman obviated the ruling of Acting Chief Justice Ian Chang, handed down in the High Court on 29th January of this year, that the Legislative Assembly has no mandate to cut the Budget, which is the sole responsibility of Government.

One cannot ignore the possibility that this could have been the outcome of a pre-arrangement between Trotman’s colleagues in the Opposition parties – PNC/APNU/AFC, the latter in which he previously held a leadership position. Of course the reaction of the Opposition to Trotman’s conclusions was great and enthusiastic acceptance, expressed by cheers and desk-thumping.
There is the belief by the public that this is a dishonourable decision, because the Speaker is not being impartial in this, given the fact that he has appealed the Acting Chief Justice’s ruling. A Notice of Appeal of Chang’s decision was filed in February by lawyer and Leader of the Alliance For Change, Khemraj Ramjattan, on behalf of Trotman, who was listed as the appellant in the court, with the Attorney General being listed as respondent.

However, President Donald Ramotar yesterday stressed the supremacy of the Constitution over all three branches of Government and posited that Acting Chief Justice Ian Chang’s ruling that the National Assembly has no mandate to cut the National Budget, but only to approve or disapprove of the estimates is as determined by the laws of the land, which the National Assembly is sworn to uphold. President Ramotar is adamant that the Speaker’s conclusions are erroneous and that the Acting Chief Justice’s ruling must be upheld in the House.

The Opposition has arrogated this right to themselves since 1992, so in a desperate effort to retain jobs, continue development and sustain – even accelerate economic growth in the county, the Government was forced in 2012 to seek judicial intervention to reverse the vindictive actions of the joint Opposition in truncating the estimates presented in the National Assembly in this, the tenth Parliament.

For approximately two decades the PPP/C has worked unremittingly to reverse the destruction and devastation visited upon Guyana and Guyanese by the former PNC regime, with magnificent success, with socio-economic development in this country poised to catalyze dramatically within the immediate future.
But the gains in the nation seem today to instead be on the brink of a downward trend as the Government of President Donald Ramotar’s administration has found itself in a quandary when the PPP/C lost its parliamentary majority to a vengeful joint Opposition in the November 2011 general elections.

The ludicrous irony of persons who had no input into Guyana’s wealth creation, even those who destroyed Guyana and left it a deeply indebted country, arrogating to themselves the right to abridge that wealth disposition to the nation and drive the workers of the country into joblessness, sent shockwaves rippling throughout the country as the implications of the budgetary cuts post-2012 Budget presentation by Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh slowly sank into the unbelieving minds of the nation.

Even the private sector was distressed because, apart from other constraining factors, consequent upon the Opposition’s vengeful actions, disposable incomes would be severely reduced in many families and government-run institutions, thus hampering purchasing power, with severe, deleterious ripple effects on the business community.

The stunned disbelief of government MPs was replicated in the faces of even Opposition media operatives who could not believe the socio-economic dislocations the Opposition collective was prepared to visit upon the nation, merely for vindictive spite, and for showing the government, in Granger’s own words, “who is boss”.

The catastrophic consequences to national development that would be occasioned by the ruthless budgetary cuts could not have been allowed by Government to prevail, because of the severe, negative socio-economic impacts on the people of the country; and thus the Donald Ramotar administration was constrained, in the face of the collective Opposition’s merciless recalcitrance, to move to the courts to seek rectification and a reversal, or a nullification of the Opposition’s budgetary cuts of 2012 and 2013.

This was granted in a ruling by Chief Justice Ian Chang pre-Budget Day of 2014. Chang ruled that the Constitution disallows the Opposition from cutting National Budgets, which is the mandate solely invested in the Government.
However, the Opposition continues to flout the law. So far, up to last evening, allocations in the 2014 budget in the Health and Amerindian Affairs sectors have been ‘butchered’ by the Opposition in the National Assembly.

And in view of their actions, pronouncements and threats, there is expectation bordering on fear in the nation that they will continue their vengeful trend of holding the nation hostage to their glory-hunting, power-seeking, self aggrandizement ploys in their continuum of dramatics in the National Assembly. In their minds, as contemptuously alluded to by Ramjattan, Guyanese people are merely “collateral damage.”