By Roysdale Forde S.C- More than two months have passed since President Irfaan Ali has been sworn into office, and more than two weeks since Members of the 13th Parliament were sworn in. Still, to this day, there exists no Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana.
No meeting has been convened, no date announced, no explanation offered. The silence from the Speaker’s chair is deafening, and it constitutes a continuing constitutional breach of the gravest order. This is not only extremely sad but particularly worrying in extant circumstances that require urgent action in this regard by the Speaker of the National Assembly.
Article 184(1) of the Constitution could scarcely be clearer:
“The Leader of the Opposition shall be elected by and from among the non-governmental members of the National Assembly at a meeting held under the chairmanship of the Speaker of the National Assembly, who shall not have the right to vote.”
The provision is cast in mandatory language – “shall be elected” – and imposes a positive duty on the Speaker to facilitate the process. It is not permissive; it is peremptory. The framers of our Constitution never intended that the Speaker be clothed with a discretio infinita, an unbounded discretion to withhold indefinitely the very mechanism that gives institutional life to parliamentary opposition.
As Lord Bingham of Cornhill, one of the most eminent jurists of the Commonwealth, observed in Reyes v The Queen [2002] UKPC 11, “The greater the discretion conferred on the holder of a public office, the more imperative the need for it to be exercised strictly within defined limits and in a manner that is transparent and accountable.” To permit indefinite delay is to confer upon the Speaker a power the Constitution manifestly withholds.
The political, social, and economic context renders this inaction not merely irregular but intolerable. Guyana stands at a historic crossroads: oil revenues are transforming the economy, public procurement contracts run into hundreds of billions of dollars, and allegations of selective tendering, political and ethnic favouritism, and the politicisation of the public service persist. In such circumstances, robust opposition scrutiny is not a luxury; it is an indispensable safeguard of the public interest.
That scrutiny is now structurally impaired. The European Union Election Observation Mission’s Final Report on the 2025 General and Regional elections was unequivocal: the incumbent People’s Progressive Party/Civic enjoyed “an undue advantage” through the systematic abuse of state resources, unequal access to state-owned media, and pressure on public servants to campaign.
The Mission identified the absence of a level playing field as one of the most serious deficiencies of the electoral process and listed, among its six priority recommendations, the urgent need for legislation governing campaign finance and the use of state assets.
A constitutionally empowered Leader of the Opposition would be the primary institutional voice to demand implementation of those recommendations. Instead, the office remains vacant, and the Executive operates with diminished accountability.
The human cost of this constitutional default falls heaviest on the hundreds of thousands of Guyanese who voted for an alternative to the governing PPP/C. Their elected representatives occupy seats in the National Assembly, yet they are denied the leadership, the procedural privileges, and the constitutional authority that flow from the Office of Leader of the Opposition. Questions that should be asked at the highest level go unasked; motions that should be moved lie dormant; the very symbolism of balanced representation is extinguished. Those citizens are, in the constitutional sense, completely unrepresented.
As Justice Kate O’Regan of the South African Constitutional Court has written, “Democracy is strengthened, not weakened, when all voices – majority and minority – are able to participate fully in the institutions designed to give them expression. The deliberate silencing or marginalisation of any group undermines the legitimacy of the democratic order itself.” (Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie [2005] ZACC 19). The prolonged absence of a Leader of the Opposition is precisely such a marginalisation, carried out not by violence but by calculated omission.
Our own, Dr. Walter Rodney, in 1979 said: “Elections are only one moment in the democratic process. If the structures that allow the people to speak between elections are destroyed or disabled, then the vote itself becomes a hollow ritual.” Today, the constitutional structure that allows almost half the electorate to speak through an organised opposition has been disabled by inaction.
The Speaker is not a free agent in this matter; he is the servant of the Constitution. He cannot plead the absence of a time limit as justification for perpetual delay, any more than a judge could refuse indefinitely to hear a case because no statute prescribes a deadline. The longer the vacuum persists, the more it assumes the character of a deliberate political strategy to emasculate the opposition and consolidate untrammelled Executive dominance.
The Hon. Speaker, Mr. Manzoor Nadir, is therefore called on, to discharge his constitutional duty without further procrastination. Summon the non-governmental members of the National Assembly, take the chair at their meeting, and preside over the election of the Leader of the Opposition as Article 184(1) commands. The rule of law requires no less; the separation of powers demands no less; the people of Guyana deserve no less.
Until that crucial meeting is held and that leader sworn,.our democracy will continue to slide into further disrepute. The time for discretion has long passed. The time for constitutional obedience is now.
