It is the season of manifestos in which prospective voters are regaled with promises of all types. It is long past the time that political parties should be making promises and breaching these solemn commitments on entering office without any penalty. Manifesto pledges should ideally be justiciable and should have grave repercussions for the leadership or line ministers when for no good reason there is abject failure to deliver.
Prospective voters have within their ability the means to discern when promises are fanciful or not grounded in reality. At that point they have the opportunity to evaluate the offerings of the various manifestos in their totality and to arrive at judicious decisions on what is possible.
With the prospect of windfall revenues from the oil and gas sector, there is already evidence of promises which are simply just promises without any real evidence of feasibility. On top of having to defend its record from 1992 to 2015, the PPP/C faces searching question over the breakdown of security during its period in office, the deterioration of the sugar industry and the absence of any significant diversification of the economy. Several of the promises it made in its manifesto outline of November 29 last year have naturally triggered questions like the pledge of 50,000 jobs over five years. That figure sounds far-fetched and the promise should come with granularity. Which sectors would yield these jobs and how? What fiscal and other concessions would be required to achieve these? No authoritative plan with striking detail has been presented by the PPP/C or its presidential candidate Mr Irfaan Ali to convince the electorate that this promise of jobs is authentic.
Similarly, the PPP/C has pledged to revitalise shuttered sugar estates to provide livelihoods to some of the 7,000 callously retrenched under the current APNU+AFC government. How feasible can it be to restart these operations given that the sugar fields have fallen into disuse and factories may have begun to deteriorate? How feasible can it be when production and productivity at the still-functioning estates continue to pose grave challenges? How feasible can it be when preferential sugar markets have vanished and our cost of production in recent years has been way beyond the world market price? Is this promise balm to the psyche of the sugar belt or a blinkered intention to restore jobs to the industry no matter the wider cost to the economy?
For the incumbent APNU+AFC, the questioning and skepticism will be even more searing as its broken promises and failures are freshly imprinted. One such failure would be its management of the oil and gas sector. The prime indictment of the governing coalition stands without any credible rebuttal – its abject negotiation of a new Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) in 2016 with ExxonMobil’s subsidiary Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited. The proximate failure and culpability would be attributable to the Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman – who was prominently present at Friday’s launch of the coalition’s manifesto – but ultimately President Granger is the one who should be held finally accountable for the disastrous deal.
The Global Witness report issued earlier this month projecting that Guyana and its people could lose as much as a mind-boggling US$55b in revenues because of the poor 2016 deal has crystallised years of vigorous criticisms of the deal by persons of credibility such as Christopher Ram, Nigel Hinds and Jan Mangal. How the incumbent will counter this damaging finding is unclear. A potential loss of US$55b outstrips in monetary value the potential value of any development contained in the coalition’s manifesto. Rather than facing its failure head-on and strategising on a plan to renegotiate this infamous deal, APNU+AFC has battened down the hatches hoping that the repercussions of this indefensible deal will seep away. That won’t happen and this poses a major problem for the coalition.
It wasn’t only its negotiating prowess that was seriously called into question in the oil and gas sector but its administrative, managerial and political skills. Guyana’s oil is being pumped to the surface today by ExxonMobil but the country is still shockingly without a well-equipped Environmental Protection Agency to guard the country’s ecological interests. The country remains without a robust legislative framework to govern the oil and gas industry even though the coalition had enormous goodwill – both local and overseas – from May 2015 up to December 2018 when the motion of no-confidence was passed. Nothing should have prevented it trying to secure the country’s interests even after December 2018 in dialogue with the opposition and civil society.
There are several other aspects of its tenure where it would be hard-pressed to mount a credible defence in its new manifesto. One of these is the area of constitutional reform. In 2015, the coalition made a solemn promise for the “Establishment of a Constitutional Reform Committee with a mandate to complete consultations, draft amendments and present same to the National Assembly for approval within nine months.”
Areas which were to be recommended for consideration of the Committee included:
1. The President should be elected by a majority of electors.
2. There should be separate elections to the presidency and national assembly.
The coalition failed comprehensively to abide by its promise but yet had the gumption to say in Friday’s new manifesto that it would:
-Continue the work of the Constitutional Reform Consultative Commission;
-Continue the allocation of funding for country-wide, community consultations; and
-Commit to contributing to a Constitution which reflects the will of the wider society, country-wide.
Who would believe this now after nearly five years of failing to deliver? One of its other major failures pertained to its own perceived constituency – the public servants. President Granger and his coalition promised in 2015 a restoration of collective bargaining throughout the public service. Five years later this pledge has been honoured in complete breach and the new manifesto does not address it.
There is ample evidence of bad faith, hypocrisy and fantasy in manifestos that have been issued. Voters need to be aware and to challenge those who would represent them to provide convincing explanations.
