Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Dec 25, 2018 News
The government still has not learnt its lesson. It has failed to grasp how its treatment of the Alliance For Change may have triggered one of the AFC’s parliamentarians to support the no-confidence motion.
The Member of Parliament, Mr. Charrandass Persaud, has said that his party, the Alliance for Change, had become ‘yes men’ for APNU, and that his party was not heeding what he was saying to them. In other words, he was saying that he was fed up with the lack of independence of his party.
Since it entered government, the AFC has been shooting itself in the foot. It went along slavishly with APNU for far too long, including in its handling of the downsizing of the Guyana Sugar Corporation.
The AFC allowed itself to become a utensil of APNU. It did APNU’s every bidding, much to the discontent of its members. And even after APNU decided to shaft the AFC by not reaching an agreement to jointly contest the 2018 local government elections, the AFC put its tail between its legs and continued its uncritical support of APNU. And this, despite the party being undermined by APNU from day one of the coalition government.
The Prime Minister was not sworn in immediately after the President was inaugurated in May 2015. In fact, the President announced Joseph Harmon as the head of the Presidential Secretariat before he had sworn in the Prime Minister.
When the Prime Minister was eventually sworn in, he was given the information portfolio. But APNU created another unit within the Ministry of the Presidency which sends out reports and press releases from that Ministry and from the President.
Under the Cummingsburg Accord, the AFC was supposed to be granted responsibility for the portfolio of internal security. This was done. But the portfolio was diluted, with the immigration and citizenship handed to an APNU appointee. The AFC said nothing about the short-circuiting of the portfolio of its two most senior Ministers.
The AFC leader Raphael Trotman was originally the Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment. The Ministry was degutted of the environment portfolio, and then oil and gas was taken away from it. Again, the AFC raised no protests. It went along meekly with those decisions.
Given that experience, it is not surprising that one of the AFC members may have decided that an end had to be put to this unsavory state of affairs.
It is one thing when you are dealing with government policy, to demand collective co-responsibility, in which all members of the government are obliged to support a common position. As such, it is expected that in such cases there is the demand that parliamentarians vote along party lines.
However, that does not apply to a no-confidence motion. A no-confidence vote is a conscience vote. It is for the members of parliament to vote in accordance with their conscience when it comes to no-confidence motions.
A no-confidence motion is aimed at demonstrating that the government has the support of the legislators. Legislators, on a no-confidence motion, should vote in accordance with their conscience, rather than on party lines, because it is only through a conscience vote that it can be determined if the government holds the support of the legislative members.
The AFC has now become just like APNU. It is demonstrating contempt for democratic principles. The AFC has expelled Charrandass Persaud without even as much as a hearing. Even the PPPC when it expelled Khemraj Ramjattan afforded him a hearing. The PNC did the same when it brought charges against Hamilton Green.
Nothing has changed since the no-confidence motion. APNU continues to ride roughshod over the AFC. One report in the media is suggesting that soon after the no-confidence vote, the President met with a group of ministers, who in turn will meet later with their AFC colleagues. In other words, the AFC is again being made to play second fiddle to APNU, even though it holds 40% of the seats of the coalition in the National Assembly. And the AFC is quite happy to accept this sort of debasement.
APNU set out to undercut the AFC in government. APNU believed that the AFC got more than it deserved after the 2015 elections. The AFC got 40% of Cabinet and parliamentary seats, even though it is believed that it brought a mere 10% of the votes, which the coalition got in those elections.
The AFC, however, can still have the last laugh. The loss of the no-confidence vote shows that its 8% support is worth much more than what APNU was willing to recognize, because all it took was one representative of that 8% base to bring down the government.
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