GOVERNMENT comprises the Parliamentary, Legislative and Administrative arms of Guyana; and the PNC/APNU/AFC combo dominates the Parliament, despite the fact that, individually, they have minority representation in the National Assembly.However, they have teamed up quite effectively to give themselves majority status in that body, but instead of crafting and driving initiatives to facilitate charting a new path to prosperity for their constituents, they have used this new dispensation (that confers on them overwhelming powers) to stymie and reverse social development and economic growth, attempting to reverse the developmental trajectory of the nation under the PPP/C Government, and describing the citizens negatively impacted by their ruthless actions as “collateral damage.”

Consequent upon the 1997 elections, Mrs. Janet Jagan became the Presidential Candidate of the PPP/C and won the elections, receiving a larger percentage of the votes than in the elections of 1992.
But, Minister Clement Rohee while eulogizing at her funeral said, “It was to be one of the most painful periods in her political life; and that of the Party… If the 1950s and 1960s had their difficulties for her and the PPP, the 1997 to 1999 period was even more testing.”
He added that it was during that period that the vilest and wickedest forms of protest — including public recourse to obeah, political manoeuvres and subterfuge — were used to dislodge her from office, eventuating in the reduction of her term by two years.
In accordance with the CARICOM-brokered St. Lucia Statement of July 2, 1998 in the wake of another post-elections reign of terror by the PNC, Mrs. Jagan was forced into truncating her term of office to three years by a CARICOM that never once interceded to assist the PPP during years when PPP was “cheated, not defeated” through rigged elections and terrorism in the land.
However, they brokered terms, all advantageous to the PNC opposition when that party was raining terror in the country, and the country was literally ungovernable because of PNC strategies a la the X-13 Plan of yesteryears.
One of the terms was to establish a Constitution Reform Commission, and to provide for its membership terms of reference compatible with the CARICOM Agreement of January 17, 1988, and the St. Lucia Statement dated July 2, 1998, wherein there were to be adequate political, private sector, and social stakeholder representation; and that body was adjured to report its recommendations to the Special Select Committee for transmission to the National Assembly.
The Herdmanston Accord that the PPP/C Government was forced to adhere to — giving up most of its rights that other regional leaders would never have agreed to, just to keep peace in the nation, consequenced, as afore-mentioned, the cutting short of Mrs. Jagan’s term in office, and inter alia, the establishing of parliamentary committees which offers the opposition great say in the policies and programmes of the Government.
And while the chair on parliamentary committees is rotational, the most important parliamentary committee of all, the Public Accounts Committee, has from inception been chaired by a PNC Member of Parliament, with former PNC Chairman, the late Winston Murray doing the initial honours. Currently PNC/APNU/AFC’s pointsman on economics, Carl Greenidge, is chairman of the Economic Services Committee; thus the two parliamentary committees on the nation’s fiscal affairs are being currently chaired by the opposition. These two, and the Social Services Committee, are Standing Committees; but all the parliamentary committees are today dominated by the opposition, which jointly reconfigured the seating, which does not reflect the PPP/C’s majority status as per its showing at the 2011 polls.
This is the modus operandi of the joint opposition that is trying to enforce what they call “shared governance” on the constitutionally-elected government.
Even both positions of Speaker and Deputy-Speaker were appropriated by the combined opposition, using their six-votes-one-seat majority as leverage — and their real intentions can be adjudged by this — to wrest, by force and subterfuge, all the powers vested in the Executive arm of Government.
The difference in ethics and trustworthiness, or lack thereof, in governance between the PPP/C and the Joint Opposition can be gauged by this, because even when the PPP/C had majority in Parliament, they allowed a sharing of the Speaker’s chair. And nowhere in the Commonwealth is the governing party relegated to no position of authority in the National Assembly. The Speaker’s chair was always held sacrosanct to governing parties.
So the Joint Opposition has great say in governing the country in a multiplicity of ways, through a menu of structures that guarantees them wide leverage to impose their will on the policies of the government. However, their intra/extra parliamentary shenanigans and utterances have exposed their incapacity and incapability, at every level, to serve the nation to achieve the zenith of Guyana’s potential for social development and economic growth.
Thus, when General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Mr. Clement Rohee, averred that APNU, the coalition in which the People’s National Congress (PNC) has the majority representation, has no “moral right” to lecture the Ruling Party on inclusive governance, he is speaking from the strength of conviction, based on that combination’s actions and nasty, divisive rhetoric post-elections 2011, when they held it in their power to make real input into the nation’s developmental paradigm.
Rohee was quoted by the Chronicle as saying at one of the PPP’s weekly news conference: “Granger and the PNC (are in) no position, nor do they have the moral right, to lecture the PPP and the PPP/C Administration on the issue of inclusive governance and participatory democracy, when they have consistently rejected all reasonable gestures made by the PPP for national reconciliation and a government of national unity.
“The PPP, during the PNC-engineered disturbances of the early 1960s, offered the PNC to share government on almost parity terms, but the PNC bluntly refused and teamed up with reactionary elements to bring down the PPP government.”
Despite President Donald Ramotar reaching out to work together for the good of the nation, the Opposition is bluntly refusing to cooperate, preferring instead to take this country once more down a retrograde anti-developmental path.
When one views the post-2011 elections charade that has made Guyana’s Parliament a laughing-stock, could anyone envisage a Cabinet shared by the PNC/APNU/AFC and the PPP/C Government?