A third party and the 33rd seat

On 2nd February, 2024, the PPP/C Government used their all-important control of the thirty-third seat in Parliament to amend the Natural Resource Fund Act to empower itself to remove a much larger portion of the money currently held in that Fund to use as they deem fit. They did so after the hapless Opposition walked out in protest.

PPP/C Minister Ashni Singh is reported to have reminded the National Assembly of the APNU+AFC’s previous walkout in December 2021 during consideration of the Natural Resource Fund Act 2021, when APNU violently seized the ceremonial Speaker’s Mace.

Singh equated the walk-out by the Opposition to part of their ‘long and documented track record of frustrating and derailing progress’. He appears to have conveniently forgotten when, in 2018, the Granger Government used their control of the thirty-third seat in Parliament to pass an earlier and very similar version of the Natural Resource Fund Act, and the PPP Opposition walked out of Parliament, calling the action by the Granger-controlled Parliament illegal. Was the PPP not ‘frustrating and derailing progress’?

The real issue of course is simply that the party which controls Parliament can make the laws to give itself access to the enormous sums of free money being deposited into the Fund by the oil investors. In effect, the party which controls the thirty-third seat in Parliament has the money; the other party has none. In the present dispensation, the Government can use its thirty-three seats in Parliament to control the oil money, and the Opposition is impotent. It can only walk out, and protest, while the Government can spend Guyana’s money unilaterally and without consultation or inclusion. Today, the APNU supporters feel the same frustration and suspicion that the PPP supporters felt in 2018. There is no difference.

On 3rd February, 2024, the APNU and AFC opposition held a press conference to condemn the amendment by the PPP/C Government of the Act. APNU representative Roysdale Forde is quoted as accusing the PPP/C of being on a ‘quest to pillage and plunder the Natural Resource Fund’. Guyanese are reminded of the US$18 million signing bonus unsuccessfully kept secret from the PPP/C Opposition when APNU held the thirty-third seat and the

Government.

A New and United Guyana insists that as long as one ethno-centric party has control of Parliament and can therefore unilaterally access the oil wealth to the exclusion of the other ethno-centric party, there will be secrecy, allegations of corruption, favouritism, and exclusionism.

A New and United Guyana presents a solution if the Government of the day does not control the thirty-third seat in Parliament. Only if a third party holds that seat will the Government of the day be unable to unilaterally change the laws to consolidate its control. It will be compelled to include the Opposition in decision-making, so that the two large parties will have to meet and agree on policies and spending and contracts and economics before any oil money is spent. It is only when both parties can participate in the decision-making that we will be able to truly say ‘One Guyana’.