A defining moment in Guyana’s politics
What transpired in the National Assembly on Friday evening and the manner in which it occurred clearly shocked the APNU+AFC administration. It was a politically unsettling development that couldn’t have come at a worse time; not with President Granger, being constrained in the extent of the execution of his day to day duties and with the country on the verge of embarking on the most momentous economic adventure in all of its history, the start of the recovery of our substantial oil resources. The international community, one suspects, will be keeping a close eye on Guyana in the period ahead. President Granger would be aware of all of these considerations.
Unexpected political moments like those on Friday evening can and do give rise to a sense of national uneasiness. Tempers flared after the vote in the National Assembly. Those on the government’s side of the House had every right to be disappointed over the departure of one of their own from what would have been anticipated. At another level the ripple effect would have coursed through the country as a whole.
The processes and outcomes that attend what we loosely call the democratic process can be wildly unpredictable. Making choices is one of those processes and outcomes bring contrasting responses. Defining moments in our political process - and last Friday’s events may well have been one of those - have a way, sometimes, of bringing out both the best and the worst in us. In the National Assembly on Friday, even before the proceedings were properly concluded, Members of Parliament gave vent to their feelings, sometimes in demonstrative, even unpalatable ways. Afterwards, some those feelings were taken outside the Chamber. Almost certainly, throughout Friday evening and into the next day the events in the National Assembly would have been the subject of animated discourse in homes and public places. Some of the themes of those discourses would have had to do with one of the coalition’s own MP’s ‘jumping ship,’ so to speak; another might have been whether what occurred on Friday evening was not a case of failure on the part of the coalition’s political intelligence to recognize that the Opposition probably knew that it was ‘on to something’ when it called for the House to be divided on the issue of the fitness of the government to rule. That, one expects, is something that the coalition will still be pondering even though they do not have the luxury at this stage of dwelling on it for much longer.
There are those as well who have chided the opposition for picking what they say was perhaps a vulnerable moment for the administration, that is, the circumstance of the President’s health. But then - and as President Granger himself clearly understands, based on his sub- sequent public response to the events of Friday evening - politics is what it is. It lives by its own frequently unpredictable ‘rules,’ and its outcomes, by their very nature, leave winners and losers in its wake.
The PPP/C parliamentarians in the National Assembly on Friday evening doubtless feel entitled to congratulate themselves on the outcome and the losers to give vent to their disappointment in ways that create no sense of national alarm. Viewed against the backdrop of occurrences in our political past this is not an unimportant consideration.
Asserting that his administration will abide by the constitutional requirements following last Friday’s events in the House, President Granger stated among other things that what happened in the National Assembly on Friday evening was “not a crisis which could dissolve into any type of confrontation,” nor, he added, are there any “grounds for any form of disorder.”
Two things should be said about President Granger’s reaction to the vote in the House on Friday evening. First, it reflects both his acute awareness of some of the deeply damaging antecedents in national political behaviour and the manner in which they have impacted on social cohesion in our country. More significantly, it seeks, unambiguously, to break with a past that has blighted our political landscape. Viewed against the backdrop of much that has been divisive and destructive in our political culture and of what is at stake for our country at this juncture, the President’s statement, one feels, is one of those moments that defines not just his leadership of the country but his entire political career. Times like these have not, characteristically, been attended by such clear headedness in our political leadership.
After Friday evening’s events President Granger sought to lift Guyana above and beyond a poisoned political culture that has, for decades, retarded our sense of nationhood, however much we pretend to the contrary. Viewed against the backdrop of the historical blemishes in our political behaviour culture the President’s response to the vote in the House on Friday may well have been a defining moment in Guyana’s post -independence politics.