Overdue 'recall' bill
An editorial viewpoint
By Rickey Singh
Guyana Chronicle
May 13, 2007
IT HAS long been coming, and its arrival should be greeted with the bi-partisan political support it deserves -- enactment of legislation to end the practice of defections, or floor-crossings in Parliament that has often occurred here and in other parliaments in the Caribbean Community
This abuse of the highest forum in a multi-party democracy to satisfy personal interest, under the cloak of "freedom of choice" of individual MPs, has in fact frequently made a mockery of the expressed will of the electorate at free and fair elections.
The primary culprit of this offence in Guyana has been the now opposition People's National Congress Reform (PNCR) under the leadership of Forbes Burnham as Prime Minister and later Executive President.
The practice of enticing, manoeuvring MPs to defect from a party, on whose platform they had originally been elected, was one of the fine political arts of the PNC's founder-leader (electoral rigging was a bigger one).
It had started with the fractures he promoted within the then Peter D'Aguiar-led United Force (UF) to increase his PNC's parliamentary majority and set the stage for his party's forever "victories" until it was simply no longer possible in a significantly different national/regional/international environment to remain in power based on electoral fraud.
By comparison, the right to "recall" an MP who defected from his/her party to either team up with another or to sit as an "Independent", has always been a principled position of the People's Progressive Party (PPP) but which would have required bi-partisan two thirds parliamentary support for passage of such legislation.
That moment has now arrived, with the first reading last week of the "recall bill", as tabled in the 65-member Parliament by Prime Minister Samuel Hinds, and clear indication from the major opposition PNCR of support to enable its approval.
As a journalist of our region, I have had to witness and cover some of the most specious, self-serving, opportunistic explanations/contentions in defence of MPs who expediently chose to defect from their parties to either sit as "Independents" or join the government benches
Not just MPs but any member of a parliamentary party has the right to leave his/or her party for reasons that may or may not be valid, to join another party.
Once, however, they arrive at the point where it is no longer feasible or desirable to remain within the fold of their original party of choice, the honest alternative in the way forward is to vacate their seats in Parliament and, if they so wish, continue their political struggle differently.
Those who, under the first-past-the-post system, would argue that they were "elected by their constituents", should know that's only half of an argument, and one that's not clever. Such MPs would also be aware of the political platform, the banner under which their "victories" were officially categorised.
Under the Proportional Representation (PR) system -- result of a "fiddled constitution", to quote former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson -- the situation is even more complex and difficult for such defectors in Parliament to justify holding on to their seats that were allocated on the basis of the so-called "list system".
Simply put, NO representative of the 65-member Guyana Parliament could possibly identify ANY segment of the valid electorate as even a potential support base, under PR.
What exists today as the Raphael Trotman-led Alliance For Change (AFC) resulted from defections suffered by the ruling PPP/C, the PNCR and Working People's Alliance (WPA). Their representatives had held on to their respective seats for as long as possible while they consolidated a base to venture into last August’s general election.
All things taken into consideration, the AFC fared reasonably well. This, however, cannot be an argument to justify self-serving politics in parliamentary defections.
For those speculating about the government's ability to secure a required two-thirds majority for passage of the 'recall' legislation, the scare being spread about divisions within the PNCR to frustrate this development, will prove false.
Robert Corbin is too much of an old hand in PNC and parliamentary politics to be outfoxed in his party's already signalled support for the bill.
Those MPs of the PNCR who may be contemplating to either absent themselves from the closing debate or, less likely, vote against the bill, would be aware of being lumped with a faction seemingly interested in the unfolding move -- ahead of the forthcoming August congress -- to replace Corbin as the party's leader.
It is doubtful that they would wish to so clumsily show their hand and make Corbin's re-election even more of a certainty than it appears to be even now.