TODAY, the Caribbean Court of Justice CCJ) will make what will effectively be the final decision on the third term issue.

In summary, a previously and still unknown citizen, Cedric Richardson, filed a case in 2014 claiming that the Constitutional Amendment of 2001 limiting a president to two terms in office was in fact unconstitutional since it was executed via Parliament and not via direct referendum, and it specifically prevented him from choosing Bharrat Jagdeo as his specific choice for president since Jagdeo has already completed two terms in office.

The case was decided in Richardson’s favour in July of 2015 by the Chief Justice, two months after the David Granger-led coalition, APNU+AFC came to power. The new government challenged the decision at the level of the Appeals Court, which upheld the Chief Justice’s decision in 2017 at, which point it took its challenge to the final court of jurisdiction, the CCJ.

The pandering to constitutional abstractions aside, this ruling is in fact about the long-held desire of Jagdeo, to perpetuate the grasp he once held on the reins of power. The issue of the former President serving a third term in office is one that is in fact over a decade old, coming into the public eye months into his final term. In May of 2007, ironically enough, it was the then Leader of the Opposition Robert Corbin, who was being asked to clarify whether a proposal for a constitutional amendment allowing for Jagdeo to run for a third term was part of their then discussions on local government. Mr. Corbin denied this was so, yet this would not be the end of the issue.

Two years later, with Jagdeo being effectively in power for the equivalent of two terms already, the issue came up once again, this time with the mysterious erection of billboards supporting a third term for Mr. Jagdeo, as well as support expressed by some senior members of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), and several prominent members of the business community. As with the billboards, it is not a leap of logic to ascribe the source of spiritual and financial support of Mr. Richardson’s case to Mr. Jagdeo himself. It is therefore no surprise that it was the Leader of the Opposition, and not the party of which he is General Secretary, that last week released a preemptive statement clearly designed to mitigate whatever fallout he might have from the decision.

Quoting the former president: “I am moved to publicly assure that whatever the ruling is, I am and will remain the General Secretary of the PPP…. Ours is a Party not built on personalities but on policies, all designed to create a better life for our people, and forge racial, ethnic and class unity. I remain committed to these policies and causes and will continue to struggle with the Party to achieve them.”
For a man who has repeatedly indicated that he would stay out of politics (he obviously changed his mind), and who has expressly said that he was uninterested in the trappings of presidential power (while, admittedly, not saying that he doesn’t want to be president again), his statement reads curiously like a concession speech at what would effectively be his first political loss. Richardson’s case is in fact Jagdeo’s case, whether or not he has publicly owned up to it.

That this administration has decided to take this case to the CCJ has to be acknowledged and commended. It is no small irony in any political environment that you have an opposition fighting for what would in effect be an indefinite perpetuation of executive leadership, and an incumbent executive fighting to ensure that it continues to be constitutionally restricted. In what has become typical of the sort of cognitive dissonance and illogical reasoning displayed by Mr. Jagdeo, on one hand he raises the wispy spectre of the ‘intention’ by President David Granger to rig elections, even as it is the President who is fighting Mr. Jagdeo in a case that, if Mr. Jagdeo wins, stands to effectively benefit the President who has not yet served a full term in office and who is as healthy as a man can hope to be in his seventies.

By fighting and winning to uphold the term restriction on presidential office, President Granger and his executive would have demonstrated that a mature statesmanship is preferable to petulance and power-hungriness. The Attorney-General Mr. Basil Williams should specifically be commended for his execution of the President’s mandate in this case, as well as his stellar support team, Barbadian Queen’s Counsel Hal Gollop and Ralph Thorne.

Of course, the outcome of this case is not written in stone. While the odds remain that the previous rulings would be overturned, they are not absolute odds. Should the CCJ uphold that it is Mr. Richardson’s ‘constitutional right’ to choose Mr. Jagdeo ad infinitum as his president, this effectively spells the effective undermining of the basic democratic process in Guyana, but not in the way that the Opposition Leader has no doubt calculated. Sure, were he at the peak of his popularity, combined with the pending oil wealth, his third Reich as it were, would be an entirely eminent catastrophe. But this is the ‘leader’ of the solitary press conferences, and unremarkable entrances into restaurants, the discomfort at diplomatic events and absence of the entourage of captains of industry at his every outing, and as Minister of State Joseph Harmon accurately described him recently, a one-man band, a man with effectively only one fiefdom left, a fiefdom that is incidentally the country’s sole effective political opposition.

A Bharrat Jagdeo who believes that he has a clear path to a third term victory in 2020, is a Bharrat Jagdeo who will in effect, complete his exercise of completely dominating the party of Cheddi Jagan and reshaping it in his own image and towards his own purpose. It will be the last stand of the old guard, its replacement not with the sort of young party faithful that he himself was once viewed as but with people directly under his control, incapable of deliberation and consensus, but ready to follow whatever orders he gives them, including orders, as he recently threatened, to disturb the peace if he does not find the next elections favourable to him.

With that scenario before them, it is doubtful that the old guard would go gently into the night, leaving the PPP’s General Secretary with what may well be a Pyrrhic victory, effectively decimating what is critical to any democracy, an effective opposition. Whatever his bluster, in any outcome of today’s decision by the CCJ, the loser will be the man for whom the case was filed in the first place: an overturning means a denial of his ambition and the end of his grasp for power in his party, as well as the final decline of his political career, while an upholding means the consolidation of his power over his party and a destruction of the party itself.