IN my article yesterday (Monday) I ended my presentation by making reference to the 15 answers, Nigel offered to the 15 questions, Dr. Randy Persaud put to him on three episodes between December 1018 and July 2020; the no-confidence vote, the governance of APNU+AFC and the March to July election atrocities.

I gave Nigel credit for being one of two persons who have made themselves available to debate controversial political and legal entanglements in which they have defined position and that they are not afraid to pontificate on. The other political actor is Vincent Alexander.
Space constraints will not allow for me to enumerate the fifteen questions and the fifteen answers. What I have done is to select the most important reactions by Nigel that I believe have critical importance in understanding the nature of adversarial politics in Guyana and how actors use their temperament to define political occurrences in Guyana.

My selections are Nigel’s take on the 33 versus 34 majority debacle in the no-confidence vote (NCV); attempts to rig the election of March 2020; and the mass retrenchment of sugar workers. In relation to the 33 versus 34. I quote Nigel: “The issue of 33 versus 32 (sic) was first raised by President Donald Ramotar when he solicited (sic) and received an opinion from Senior Counsel indicating that 33 was not the majority. Upon demitting office, this opinion was left as part of the official record and my repetition of it was merely the repetition of an earlier opinion from President Ramotar’s presidential records.”

The focus is on the word, “repeat.” My contention was Nigel did not “repeat” the legal opinion Senior Counsel gave President Ramotar but promoted the pronouncement that 33 is not majority of 65 and submitted a case study on the island of Vanuatu. I quote Nigel again: “One of the unfortunate consequences of the ruling of the CCJ is that in Guyana, a simple and absolute majority requires the same number of votes, 33 members of the National Assembly.”
The weakness in that argument lies in constitutional opaqueness. And there was a simple way out of that cloudiness. Since the constitution does not articulate what number constitutes an “absolute” majority, then the route to take was to adopt the traditional voting pattern of Parliament – a majority vote. From 2015 to 2020, the ANPU+AFC passed all of its budgets and Bills by a simple majority of 33 against the PPP’s 32.

The Chancellor of the Judiciary weakened the argument of 34 being an absolute majority of 65 by her random selection of 34. Why 34 and not 38? Why 38 and not 40. Why is 34 an absolute majority in the House? By what reasoning 34 was chosen instead of 33?
Secondly, rigged election. I think Nigel is on shaky ground when he wrote: “Allegations regarding the 2020 elections remain highly contentious with both sides making claims of infractions.” I think this is not an accurate reflection of what happened. There were assertions and allegations. The assertions came from the PPP, whose statement of polls showed that it had won the contest. Allegations came from the losers who used allegations to cast aspersions on the integrity of the process.

It is appropriate to repeat what the CARIOM recount team said in its final report. It described the allegations of APNU and the AFC as a fishing expedition. Nigel must have read the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the election. The conclusion would differ profoundly and formidably from his theory of mutual allegations.

Nigel is threading on dangerous ground in that given his theory of mutual allegations, then how can you ever have a scientifically definitive election result if you are willing to legitimize allegations of the loser? All the loser has to do is cry foul and you end up giving credibility to the mischief of the loser.
I disagree with Nigel when on the refusal to hold elections three months after the NCV, Nigel wrote: “As a society, we must recognise the challenges of unprecedented legal issues.” There were no complex legal entanglements on the NCV. An NCV is a banal parliamentary procedure that is common throughout the world. The APNU+AFC created legal intricacies in order not to hold the election three months after and the CCJ untangled the knots to arrive at legal simplicities.

Thirdly, the sugar workers disaster. Space has run out. The issue was not the money-losing industry but the bullyism of the state refusing severance pay and refusing to offer abandoned sugar lands to the workers so they could live.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.