The recent controversy concerning the President’s appointment of ministers of the new Cabinet before they were declared elected as members of parliament has given rise to considerable speculation. So has the subsequent decision of the High Court justifying in law President Jagdeo’s action.
The High Court decision is on appeal, so there is no need to comment further on that aspect. However, the events considered by the courts throw an interesting light on the different constitutional roles of a majority party, parliament and the presidency.
Sir Michael Davies in his 2005 report on the National Assembly stated that, although it is recognized by the Constitution as being separate and paramount, parliament was sadly not playing its proper role in governance. He identified the “main weaknesses”:-
“Lack of independence of the parliament and its management from the control of the Executive; Members who are not sufficiently au fait with their role within the parliamentary framework; An Opposition which is angry and frustrated and therefore does not grasp the opportunities afforded it by the rules of procedure; Standing Orders in need of revision; A committee system which is not properly functioning; Insufficient qualified staff, with ill-defined roles and lack of procedural knowledge; No awareness of the National Assembly’s responsibility to relate with civil society, the private sector and the wider public.”
He concluded from his interviews and readings from Guyana’s modern history “that Guyana has had no tradition or history of a truly working parliamentary democracy.” As he pointed out, during the period ending with 1992, the National Assembly suffered “degradation” and the tradition of parliamentary governance was badly damaged.
But even in modern Britain (as has been pointed out by Professor Scot Gordon in his work Controlling the State, 1999 Harvard University Press, pg. 334) the traditional distinction between legislative and executive branches may no longer apply as the function of law making is effectively in the hands of cabinet which has become the central legislative and executive organ in the British political system.
Add to these factors, many of which apply in Guyana, the superimposition on our constitutional framework of a powerful executive presidency, and one can understand the severe limitations on the “sovereignty of parliament”.
This was illustrated after the last election, when the ministers of government were appointed by the newly elected President and sworn in even before the General Secretary of the PPP as its List Representative had selected those persons on his party’s list who would be declared members of parliament.
The constitution provides that (with a few technocratic exceptions) ministers must be elected Members of Parliament. And it fell to the party’s General Secretary as its list representative to name those persons who would go into parliament as elected members, and to the Chief Elections Officer to declare them so elected.
One notes a number of new names who have been appointed ministers for the first time. One also notes a number of old PPP stalwarts, who might well have expected appointment, who have not been given ministerial posts. The appointment of ministers before the senior official of his party had obtained their declaration as members of parliament certainly brought to an end any discussion by the PPP leadership on the allocation of ministers.
Although the constitution vests in the Executive President the power of ministerial appointment, by naming its General Secretary as its list representative, responsible for informing the Chief Elections Officer of the identities of the persons selected to sit in parliament as representatives of the PPP, the PPP as a party retained some measure of influence, if not control, over the selection of ministers, as the constitution plainly required that the members of parliament be identified and declared to be such before they were appointed ministers.
But the President “jumped the gun” and the court declared that it was not a false start. In reporting this issue the media have essentially treated it as an accident, an administrative blip, which the court had to pronounce on. But deeper political factors may have been at work.
There has always been a potential for institutional conflict between Forbes Burnham’s concept of the executive presidency which he imposed on Guyana and Cheddi Jagan’s concept of the political party in terms of which the PPP was created and developed by him and his comrades.
Although within the PNC Burnham ensured his absolute power by crafting a party constitution which made him as its leader the virtual governor of a colonial polity, he also ensured his personal authority over the state by creating an executive presidency which literally allowed him to do what he wanted, given his control over the party and his perpetual hold on power through electoral manipulation and fraud. Lastly, he created a tame judiciary that would look the other way and not interfere with his “arrangements”.
With the disappearance of rigged elections and the acceptance by the PPP leadership of Burnham’s executive presidency, the constitutional structure has remained essentially the same subject to two differences, relevant to these circumstances.
One is the amendment that limits a person to two presidential terms. The other is less obvious – the separation of interest between a president who did not create his party in his own image, and a party, the organisation of which is based on democratic centralism and executive collegiality.
After the PPP returned to office in 1992 from 24 years in the wilderness of a parliamentary dictatorship, this latent institutional conflict was obscured by the fact that it was Cheddi Jagan, the embodiment of the party through all those years, who was president.
But Cheddi has gone, and the conflict between Burnham’s constitution and Jagan’s party is well on the way. In these terms, the most interesting story since the last election is not the conflict between the PNC and the PPP. It is the conflict between the government and the governing party, between the concept of a president who can do what he likes whether or not the majority party in parliament agrees (or is even consulted beforehand) and a party the leaders of which consider themselves equal and regard it as having a mission that transcends the personal powers of the presidency.
