What on earth are Granger and Ramjattan and their merry men and women waiting for before they ‘get on their bikes’ and start moving around this country, taking the pulse of the people, finding out what their concerns are and start representing those concerns to the people like self-respecting opposition political parties should? Look Gentlemen, this is no fancy dress parade, you know! The political space that you occupy courtesy of the votes of the majority of the Guyanese people is not some kind of public catwalk. So stop strutting your stuff like high-priced models and get on with it. Get the campaign cobwebs out of your heads, set aside such dreams as you may have dreamed about seeing the inside of the Cabinet room at OP and get on with the business of being a REAL OPPOSITION.
BE ON NOTICE that the Guyanese people are going to be looking for much more than high-browed speeches crafted by your PR experts and delivered in oratorical styles designed to attract the applause of the House. It’s the PEOPLE’S PARLIAMENT! Remember? So LETS TAKE THE PARLIAMENT TO THE PEOPLE! Glue us to our radios and our TV’s with combative settings of the National Assembly. PUT THE OTHER SIDE ON THE BACK FOOT FOR A CHANGE! Remember they have grown used to playing FRONT FOOT CRICKET. So ‘bless dem up’ with some good, short-pitched bowling al la Andy Roberts from time to time. As the English cricket commentators love to say: KEEP THEM HONEST!
LISTEN UP David and Khemraj! This business of TAKING PARLIAMENT TO THE PEOPLE is deadly serious business. You know as well as we do that for the longest while the people of this country have treated the National Assembly as though it were A SEPARATE REPUBLIC. Well here’s your chance to close down THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY! Here’s your chance to ensure that the chairs in the House cease to be recliners for MP’s LIKE Sam Hinds and Clement Rohee to nod off for hours and to be awakened from their slumber at the end of long boring debates just to vote Bills into law. Give us an undertaking that The SLEEPERS WILL SLEEP NO MORE. Give us an undertaking that there will be DING DONG TUSSLES in the National Assembly and that the vacuous, half-baked presentations by the peripheral MP’s will come to an end. Let’s have cogent, well thought out arguments and let the better arguments prevail for a change.
But that’s not where TAKING PARLIAMENT TO THE PEOPLE ends. You have to hit the road. Let the MP’s put their speeches and their duty-free cars and their suits and ties aside and fan out across the country. Let them go to places where the potholes in the streets number in their hundreds; where a drizzle brings floods; where single women with numerous children live in one-room spaces; where water hasn’t come through taps in years; where small boys play cricket on the streets because they have no place to play; where schools close when lil rain falls and where mosquitoes devour people in high day time. Let them embrace the words of Walter Rodney and “ground” with the people; and let them remind the government and the whole nation that while the state media goes on parrot fashion about economic development and the imminent discovery of oil and the promise of an El Dorado and how One Lap Top Per Family will transform the nation, there is a seamier side to this Republic; that thousands of people still live in conditions of purgatory. Let your MP’s give the people undertakings that their predicaments will be shouted to the high heavens in the National Assembly…….. AND THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE MADE TO LISTEN AND TO ACT. That way there will be a connection between Buxton and Parliament; between Little Biaboo and Parliament; between Kwakwani and Parliament and between the Pomeroon River and Parliament.
It’s either you do that or you forget about this business of being a parliamentary opposition. Remember fellas. You are temporary servants of the Guyanese people; not United States Supreme Court Judges. This is not a lifetime thing!
