The upcoming general elections in Guyana will be a significant one for the future of this nation, perhaps as important as the 1992 mandate. Guyana records 1992 as a milestone year when the nation’s politics transitioned to democracy, albeit with US aid under the watchful gaze of the Carter Center.
Today, Guyana is positioned at yet another crossroads, this time an economic one, following the country being internationally identified as having the fastest growing economy, not only in the Caribbean region, but in the world. This was revealed on June 28 in an analysis on the Nasdaq stock exchange website, where Guyana’s potential growth was projected to be around a rate of 16.3 percent for the period 2018-2021. Figures used to arrive at this optimistic projection came from the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects June 2019 data.
As we all know, the voluminous oil discoveries by ExxonMobil in the Stabroek Block are driving this promise. According to Nasdaq’s analysis, “Guyana is projected to be among the world’s largest per-capita oil producers by 2025”. While the growth figures last year, and for the rest of 2019, remain moderate at 4.1 percent and 4.6 percent respectively, this is expected to dramatically increase to 33.5 percent and 22.9 percent in 2020 and 2021 after oil extraction begins.
Given the projection for such a bullish future, it is evident that Guyana is positioned on yet another threshold in 2019; one that could prove to be another significant and defining national moment from what has undoubtedly been a challenging history, evident in its political, social, and economic scars, but simultaneously amplified by the recent strides taken for healing, recovery, and reconstruction since that 1992 milestone.
It is important these positive, acquisitive strides continue – for Guyana itself and nationals in the homeland, for its supportive, remittance-driving population here in the GTA and elsewhere in the diaspora, and for the growing impetus of investors abroad now eyeing its burgeoning oil potentiality.
Therefore, Guyana’s present political liminality, and the partisan, recalcitrant stalling by the APNU+AFC caretaker government and its leader, President David Granger, remain a major concern. Guyana and its development, and its nationals both at home and abroad, given its promising uptick ahead, do not deserve such a state of limbo.
It remains a distressing outcome that Guyana’s constitutional directives were disregarded by the APNU+AFC administration following the December 21, 2018 no-confidence vote. Particularly that Article 106 (6) did not trigger the resignation of the defeated government and its adoption of a caretaker role. Article 106 (6) is unequivocal: “The Cabinet including the President shall resign if the Government is defeated by the vote of a majority of all the elected members of the National Assembly on a vote of confidence”.
Instead, the governing administration engaged in faulty, sophistic arithmetic and Orwellian obfuscation, delaying an outcome until it took consequential orders from the Caribbean Court of Justice to reaffirm the Constitution’s unambiguous mapping.
That Granger acted unconstitutionally in the unilateral appointment of Justice James Patterson to the GECOM chairmanship is also a distressing outcome. Yet again, it took the CCJ’s intervention to affirm that Granger’s actions violated the Constitution’s prescriptions.
Therefore, it is with irony that we view Granger’s pronouncement last Friday, when he said, “Guyanese, the Constitution of Guyana is sacrosanct and supreme”; a day later, his caretaker government proclaimed: “Cabinet has not stopped functioning”.
As it now stands, general elections are due in three months following the CCJ’s June 18, 2019 pronouncement. For Guyana to move out of its unhappy state of limbo, the APNU+AFC must cease and desist normal functioning as a government and begin a caretaker role; also, all energies must be expended leading up to general elections, including urgent selection of a new GECOM chairman.
More than ever now, Guyana needs non-partisanship leadership, positioned as it is at the crossroads of an unfolding petroleum future.