YESTERDAY, President Dr Irfaan Ali offered the parliamentary opposition a seat at the table to discuss the work of Parliament’s committees.
The opposition did not take it. That refusal deserves more than a shrug, because it is the latest entry in a pattern that has defined this opposition since the last election.
For months, WIN and APNU have built their public brand around one core complaint that they are excluded, unconsulted, ignored.
US-indicted Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has said as much repeatedly. Aubrey Norton has said it for years.
Fair enough, until the moment engagement is actually put in front of them, at which point the instinct is not to sit down and discuss but to find a reason to stay away. An opposition cannot credibly demand a seat at the table and then leave it empty when one is pulled out for them.
This is not new behaviour. In May last year, Opposition MPs walked out of the National Assembly rather than debate a motion reaffirming Guyana’s sovereignty over Essequibo, which is a matter of national survival, not partisan advantage, because they wanted the wording rewritten first.
Whatever the procedural grievance, abandoning a debate on the country’s territorial integrity over a drafting dispute is theatre, not principle. It signals a movement more comfortable registering objections from outside the chamber than doing the harder work of shaping outcomes from inside it.
And when the opposition is left alone with itself, with no government minister to blame, the results are no better. On August 24, Norton and Mohamed finally held the high-profile APNU-WIN sit-down Guyanese had been promised for months, meant to resolve opposition representation on GECOM, the naming of scrutineers, the Region Ten impasse, and nominations to the Local Government Commission.
By every account, it produced agreement on none of it. Attorney General Anil Nandlall, reviewing the outcome, asked the question many Guyanese were already asking privately: if two opposition parties cannot agree with each other after months of build-up to a single meeting, what confidence can anyone have that they could handle the thousands of consequential decisions that running a government actually requires?
That is the real issue beneath Tuesday’s no-show. National development is not built on press conferences and grievance statements; it is built in the unglamorous rooms where sectoral committees, budget hearings, and oversight bodies do their slow, necessary work.
Every boycotted sitting, every walkout, every collapsed opposition-to-opposition meeting is a choice to opt out of that process rather than shape it. You cannot scrutinise an Auditor General’s report, question a minister’s spending, or improve a bill from outside the building.
Guyana is navigating the most consequential economic transformation in its history, one that demands sustained, unglamorous engagement from everyone holding a seat in the National Assembly.
Guyanese who voted for WIN, APNU, or any opposition party deserve a movement capable of converting grievance into governance, not one whose defining political statement is an empty chair.
Tuesday’s absence was not principle. It was pattern, and patterns, unlike single incidents, are exactly what should tell voters whether an opposition is ready to lead the country it says it wants to run.