‘The inclusive power-sharing system established by the Good Friday Agreement (that President Bill Clinton saw as ‘a work of genius that’s applicable if you care at all about preserving democracy)’ was a landmark achievement that established a framework for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’ … This is a highly partisan time in American politics, and there are very few issues, precious […]
Future Notes
The Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton, is quite correct not to meet or have any official discussions with the president or anyone if proper information and good reasoning is not provided. Consultations are considered useful because in political management they can reduce the impact of what one writer called the ‘silo mentality’. Multiple viewpoints usually produce better decisions […]
Joe Biden came to the presidency of the United States of America at a very trying time for American democracy and when globally democracy was on the decline. Varieties of Democracy report 2022 tells us that ‘2021 comes with a record number of nations autocratizing in the last 50 years’, with some 2.8 billion people affected (https://v-dem.net/media/publications/dr_2022.pdf). Coming to the […]
All modern Guyanese leaders have had to navigate a relatively hostile ethnic political context, and given their political socialization, most of them believed and many still do that they and their party alone with the right policies could significantly ameliorate the ethnic discord without fundamental changes to the political system. This is wishful thinking after some seven decades of political […]
A few weeks ago, the Opposition Leader, Mr. Aubrey Norton, outlined a number of issues other than the constitutionally required ones that he would like any meeting with President Irfaan Ali to address. In a Stabroek News article ‘One of the most advanced constitutions in the Region’ (SN: 24/04/2022), Mr. Ralph Ramkarran said that the President of the Caribbean Court […]
Like 62% of Guyanese people’s feeling about general elections in general, I could not say with any certainty that the results of the 2020 national and regional elections reflected the will of the people. Indeed, I am fairly certain that they did not, and that this is largely the result of the political parties creating, maintaining and taking advantage of […]
Since the 1950s, political disturbances in Guyana have led to the loss of hundreds of lives, much property and persistent underdevelopment. In the late 1990s these disturbances resulted in the Caribbean Community-brokered Herdmanston Accord and the St. Lucia Statement, which led wide-ranging constitutional reform that the parties thought would put an end to the persistent turmoil. The constitutional reformers on […]
For more than a decade Future Notes has repeatedly argued that Guyana does not have a united public opinion able to hold governments accountable and that, therefore, shared governance must be the way forward. Recently the USAID’s ‘Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Assessment’ in Guyana took a similar position. Upon coming to office after the controversial 2020 elections results, the […]
If my interpretation of her is correct, there is something deeply troubling about the process outlined in Minette Bacchus’ ‘Granger and the non-appointment of coalition MPs’ (VV: 03/04/2022) about the management style of former president David Granger as it relates to the delay in the appointment of the Opposition PNC Members of Parliament (MPs) and more specifically the appointment of […]
-GECOM requires consensual management In my Future Notes (SN: 02/06/2018) , I argued that the Carter formula for appointing members of the Guyana Elections Commission was simply the localized application of a mechanism that has been in existence for centuries. What it sought to accomplish went beyond its being neutral: the proposers were trying to establish legitimacy by balancing the […]
