Now that the brief and bitter election campaign has ended, here’s hoping the post-election process is not unduly delayed and we settle down to business sooner rather than later. We only have to consider Guyana’s recent agony and the psychical injury sustained by all.
Under the lingering, durable shadow of a pandemic, we are now called upon to consider our survival options at levels that span the personal, private and public spaces we all occupy as citizens.
Politicians and their devotees now have room to address the denial that occasioned so much of what obtained over recent weeks. It was an affliction sustained across the political aisle.
The campaign was a relatively short but unique one. The dissolution of parliament in July occurred in the midst of urgent pandemic mitigation efforts.
The election call meant that while the work of the Cabinet continued—guided in large measure by the urgent work of the health ministry—there were grounds for reasonable concern about the absence of a high level of bipartisan political oversight over a variety of state functions.
These included matters of pandemic expenditure, adjustments to schooling arrangements, and foreign policy positioning, among others – all services a functioning parliament could have critically interrogated.
These subjects never quite gained traction over the course of the campaigns as other far less worthy issues rose to prominence. There was never really a clinical, independent dissecting of these matters—just unsubstantiated invective and cussing.
This is not to suggest deliberate malpractice, but simply to say that a high and diligent level of civil society and political scrutiny had not featured prominently. Most appeared otherwise occupied in providing open and tacit tribal support through name-calling, sniping and vile hostility.
The early convening of the new parliament should promptly attend to these issues. To be fair, there has been a significant effort to allay suspicion regarding pandemic expenditure. However, the opportunity now exists, especially in view of a forthcoming national budget exercise, to eliminate any doubt.
This period also provides the new administration with an opportunity to review the issues that led to the bungling of arrangements for disbursement of relief packages. With the election out of the way, there is now no convenient, political escape route.
For instance, when my wife publicly observed, on behalf of her employee, that the salary review grant was being delayed as a result of an absurd resort to manual methods when an automated system was available, it was virtually dismissed as yet another politically instigated annoyance. This is a bad habit that must be kicked.
There are clear bureaucratic obstacles and human capacity issues to be addressed that would require an honest, systematic examination of how the public service works.
In fact, assigned the task of moderating public consultations on a review of the public service about seven years ago, I never got the impression that the officials presiding over the process were as committed to the exercise as were the “public” and selected sectors whose views were being entertained.
In the end, absolutely nothing came out of it. There needs to be an independent review that reduces the active involvement of the people whose practices and systems are being examined.
The new parliament—and I am proposing a greater role for bipartisan behaviour here—must also have a close look at the ways the pandemic will continue to affect the way we do business, learn, play, and entertain ourselves.
Now that the folly of politically motivated COVID-denial has been settled by a virtual referendum on treatment of the subject, our country needs to get to these tasks in a much more wholesome manner to address the demands of a new era.
Though it appeared as a marginal area of concern by most during the campaign, the fact of a pandemic has to be actively engaged by all. The conduct of recent weeks however provided evidence that political will and possible political sacrifice for the sake of COVID-19 could not prevail over a compulsion to win.
We need to fix this. We need to fix many things.