OPINION: Promises

Last Updated on Monday, 25 August 2025, 23:25 by Writer

By Neville J. Bissember

The campaign promises that you highlighted in Stabroek News‘ editorial of 19 August all carry with them various costs requiring budgetary support. The editorial speculates that this could become an exercise of one-upmanship among the contesting parties in the final stretch of their campaigns, notwithstanding the vagaries of exogenous factors like market and price fluctuations, climate shocks and supply chain disruptions. And yet, why is it that initiatives like a clean voters list, biometrics and pragmatic governance-sharing, all of which cost relatively little in terms of a drain on the Treasury, have not been championed in any parties’ campaign, although they themselves have in the past seen it fit so to do?

In so far as promises made and promises kept go in our political affairs, there is vintage video footage of Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo extolling the benefits of several changes that at the time he opined were necessary and sufficient conditions to improve our electoral system, with two in particular being: a “new clean” voters list to prevent abuses by migrants and dead voting, and secondly, “enhanced biometrics”: nothing was done back then. Yet here we are again and the opposition parties have been arguing the same case of their opponents from years ago, but GECOM is still mounting another election with a bloated voters list that compares in size to our population (maybe GECOM will again say that without legislation, its hands are tied)!

Or shared governance: it is a concept which does not fit well within the “winner-take-all” provisions of our constitution yet opposition parties are once again harping on this. Isn’t is convenient that parties only preach about shared governance when they are in opposition!? Where was the talk of shared governance during the term of APNU-AFC from 2015-2020, during which time it required six months and appeals to seven judges of our apex court to perform the simple primary school calculation of 65 ÷ 2.

Constitutional and legislative amendments apart, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the main parties from invoking magnanimity and good sense and reaching across the divide, to share governance based on merit, competence and experience with “others” in Cabinet and other senior posts within the Administration. After all, is this not how the “C” and the “R” became appended in the first place to the PPP and the PNC, respectively?

Recently, a party mainly of newcomers held a photo-op where three persons sat at a table and signed a piece of paper and announced that they had in so doing signed a contract with the people of Guyana. I was puzzled because I had not been consulted on the contents of this “contract” and albeit one of the signatories is a lawyer, it was not explained by what modality the people were thusly bound by this “contract”, it having been signed by three persons whose representative status on behalf of the people remains unclear. That apart I am optimistic that issues such as a clean voters list, biometrics and pragmatic shared governance are low-hanging fruit that any “newbie” party would gladly embrace within its explanation of what this “contract” entails.

Could it be that the silence on these three issues and the focus instead on tangible, material “goodies” in the ongoing campaigns is because the former are not really important, or they are not “vote-getting”, or they are self-serving and only deserving of lip-service, or… ? I will listen out at the final rallies (not whistle-stop meetings) of the electoral campaigns to hear if any politician would be so inclined to add these measures as promises to be kept when they win, which would undoubtedly be beneficial to both their causes and their constituents, at an insignificant cost to the public purse…