On reading the Stabroek News article ‘Democracy is Bureaucracy’ (SN: 18/08/2017), I was again reminded of the need for conceptual clarity as we seek to broaden the 
scope of political participation for being imprecise could lead to deliberate avoidance or our missing important aspects of the discourse. In that article, rather than providing the public with reasonable explanations of why his government has not fulfilled its manifesto promise to begin the process of constitutional reform within the first 100 days of assuming office, and why after two years the Local Government Commission has not been established, the chairperson of the Alliance for Change (AFC), Mr. Khemraj Ramjattan, sought refuge in the commonplace notion of bureaucratic sloth. Indeed, his most useful contribution was that the current state of play is due to ‘concrete situations…especially financial challenges and changed circumstances.’ Even if it was, Mr. Ramjattan stretched our credulity when he sought to have us believe that after some decades in the political process and in the National Assembly, he has only now come to understand that ‘democracy is bureaucracy’.
