…on GECOM Chair
Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo became a lawyer is his old age, and maybe should be excused for deliberately ignoring its nuances. After all, at that age, the choice of such training could’ve only been an expedient decision to burnish his credentials to become President of Guyana. He’d abandoned his position as Minister of Information under Jagan when he made that decision to enter law school as a big, old man!
That the very best he achieved under the PNC-led APNU/AFC government was Information Minister — after all his contortions and betrayals — just proves that poetic justice is alive and kicking!! Anyway, all of this gnashing of teeth by your Eyewitness was fuelled by Nagamootoo excusing Pressie’s unilateral choice on the GECOM Chair as ‘necessary to prevent a constitutional crisis”!!
Can you believe how low Nagamootoo would sink to preserve his perks? What else would persuade him to make such a ridiculous statement? So Pressie averts a crisis by breaking the Constitution, the highest law of the land, by which he’s bound? What is this? To avoid a storm that threatens a ship, the captain sinks the ship? This is “saving”?? At what cost?
What about the passengers? In this case the Guyanese people — now that Pressie has shown he considers judicial pronouncements on constitutional appointments as “perception” – which don’t trump his “perceptions”. And this is why Pressie has dug a fatal hole in the Guyanese ship of state: he’s echoing his hero Burnham’s Declaration of Sophia, announcing the paramountcy of the Executive over the Judiciary; and since he is already paramount over the Legislature, he‘s now paramount over the state.
And this is what Moses Nagamootoo is willing to cravenly defend. He was screwed over once, when Pressie threw out the Cummingsburg Accord with all its promises of increasing his powers as PM and gave him ‘Larwah’. Is he now willing to have all Guyana screwed over?
He speaks of “crisis”!! If there was any crisis over the GECOM Chair, it was because of Pressie’s incredible assertion that because Art 161 (2) mentioned the word “judge” four times, that means only a judge was qualified for the position!!
So what is this? Constitutional interpretation by “word count”?? And Nagamootoo, more than anyone else in or out of Guyana, has to have known about Pressie’s compulsion to do his things his way and the devil take the hindmost. Look at what a plaything he’s become!
Your Eyewitness has a question for Nagamootoo: If Pressie can unilaterally appoint the GECOM Chair, what’s the point of the Price-Carter formula to involve the Opposition Leader?
Is the law such an ass?
…on ‘elephant in the room’
Even commentators who’re not noted for taking “slants” couldn’t fail to notice the elephant in the room in which the 84-year old ex-justice was chosen as GECOM Chair. Pressie had explicitly announced the only reason he’d humiliated ex-Justice Kennard and summarily kicked him off the Police Complaint Board was because of his age!!
The urgency was presumably caused by concluding the aged Kennard wouldn’t be able to properly evaluate the complaints in front of him. Now, Kennard hadn’t shown any signs of incipient senility; so what was the rush? After all, the position still hasn’t been filled, and the complaints are spilling out of the windows!
The only seemingly visible reason for the disparate treatment of Kennard – who’s actually younger than Patterson – is easy for readers to surmise.
This surmise is buttressed by Pressie also appointing 80+old Hamilton Green to high office, and sacking Prem Persaud, who’s younger that Green.
…on swearing-ins
So why was Patterson sworn-in in the heat of the night – just two hours after selection? The experts say it was to prevent a court challenge.
So what makes this different from the condemned Janet swearing-in?
