On February 16, during the debate in the National Assembly on supplementary budget allocations, Finance Minister Ashni Singh declared that the government had found itself “in completely uncharted territory,” a reference to the delayed approval of supplementary budget financing based on opposition queries relating to the legality of some of the spending. In reality, Dr Singh’s “uncharted territory” more accurately describes the administration’s discomfort over the fact that its accustomed prerogative of passage of such bills in the National Assembly has now been removed.
It is not just the government but the entire National Assembly and the nation as a whole that finds itself in “uncharted territory,” though the administration, its comfort zone of a parliamentary majority now removed, might perceive itself as having greater reason for unease over what has now become a much more challenging trek across that territory. Old habits die hard and that, essentially, is how we interpret Dr Singh’s remark.
One positive that has so far emerged from the proceedings of the Tenth Parliament is that, given the anomalies that have been known to exist in the government’s culture of spending and, perhaps more importantly, accounting for its expenditure, the requirement that it account satisfactorily and publicly to the other side of the House now allows for a freer flow of critical information into the public domain.
Whatever the extent of the government’s discomfort over the new requirement of greater accountability in the National Assembly in matters of public spending, the net result – in circumstances where allegations of graft, corruption and profligate spending under the previous political administration remain matters of serious public concern – will be sufficiently important to the nation as a whole to cause the government’s unease to seem like a small matter indeed. The issue here is accountability.
One might argue too that the Tenth Parliament now imposes on parliamentarians on all sides of the House much greater responsibility than had been the case previously. Hitherto, sittings of the National Assembly, particularly budget debates, had been characterized not only by considerable public disinterest but by levels of boredom inside the National Assembly that either drove parliamentarians into fitful slumber or else, to excursions into witticisms designed to break the monotony of the proceedings. They could pursue these indulgences in the knowledge that the outcomes of debates had long been determined and their only real purpose was to cast their votes in predictable divisions of the House.
This year, the parliamentary debate on the budget has been markedly different. The discourses were more vigorous, more intense. Not only did the real possibility of cuts in budgetary allocations compel greater circumspection by subject ministers in addressing opposition questions and queries in matters pertaining to their allocations, the fact of an opposition majority also compelled the government side of the House to press their MP’s into additional extra-parliamentary lobbying through hastily arranged media conferences. Those efforts were supplemented by a huge public demonstration in the vicinity of Parliament Building during which we witnessed the altogether unprecedented sight of cabinet ministers, permanent secretaries and other senior government officials demonstrating in support of the budget alongside placard-bearing rank-and-file state employees.
Sixty miles away, in Linden, residents were having their own militant say on the budget debate in the National Assembly. The announcement that the 2012 budget would bring increases in electricity rates provoked a massive public protest which, from all reports, literally brought the mining town to a halt; and when reports surfaced that talks between Opposition Leader David Granger and President Donald Ramotar had settled the issue in favour of the government’s intended increase in electricity rates, those reports were taken sufficiently seriously by APNU to send Messrs Granger and Rupert Roopnaraine dashing off to the mining town to assure agitated residents there that APNU would vote against the planned increase.
All of this is “uncharted territory,” a new form of political behaviour not only for the government, but for the National Assembly as a whole and it is a journey that we would have been required to make sooner or later.
Perhaps the real significance of the outcomes of the 2012 debate reposes not so much in the few concessions made by the government, but the greater openness that informed the discourses in the National Assembly and evidence of far greater public involvement in the process. There were instances in which both sides of the House reached out beyond the confines of Parliament both to explain their positions and to secure extra-parliamentary support for their exertions inside the National Assembly. That, perhaps above all else provides an indication of heightened levels of public interest and involvement in the work of the National Assembly and that too is an uncharted path down which we must go in order to give greater credence to our claim to being a democratic nation.
