Dear Editor,
Guyanese, we are again at a constitutional crossroads, staring at the gross intransigence of provisions that were never designed for the country we have become. The current impasse involving WIN, the newest force in our politics, is not a mere technicality; it is a textbook case of how constitutional inertia can deny a living people their living mandate. We are governed today by rules and mechanisms that WIN and its supporters had no part in crafting, yet they are expected to bow before them as if they were sacred and eternal. That is neither justice nor democracy; it is the past handcuffing the future.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the composition of the Guyana Elections Commission. The opposition representatives on GECOM, drawn from the old PNC camp, sit there under a veil of “security of tenure” so absolute that there is no functioning, living mechanism to refresh those seats when the political will of the people changes. They remain, in law, “opposition” commissioners even when they are no longer part of, nor aligned with, the largest opposition force in Parliament. The result is a grotesque distortion: WIN commands the largest bloc of opposition seats, yet GECOM’s “opposition” voice is locked in a time capsule, answering to a party that the electorate has already demoted. A device that was once sold as balance has now mutated into a shield for yesterday’s opposition against today’s voters.
This did not happen by accident. The GECOM appointment formula was crafted for a two party dynasty, an era in which political life was imagined as an eternal tug of war between red and green. The much touted “Carter formula” and its subsequent embedding in the constitution assumed that there would always be one government party and one opposition party, with no room for a third force to break the duopoly. It was written for a closed game, not an open democracy. When the law assumes only two players, anyone else who earns the people’s trust is treated as an intruder, not a shareholder.
On 1st September 2025, that old stranglehold on power was shattered. WIN’s emergence to parliamentary prominence was not a fluke; it was the people’s quiet revolution against inherited loyalties, stale ideologies and ethnic siege politics. Voters trusted their instincts, took a risk and altered the political landscape. Yet, months later, the foundational organs of the state still behave as if nothing has changed. The will of the people has moved on; the machinery of the constitution has not. That gap between popular sovereignty and institutional reality is where distrust, instability and alienation breed.
Worse, the old guardians of the duopoly, both in government and opposition, are not merely sitting atop this outdated architecture; they are actively bending it to override the new mandate. We saw it starkly in the recent battle over the election of the Leader of the Opposition, where the Speaker of the National Assembly appeared less like an impartial umpire and more like a political actor, crafting his own rules and foisting his personal interpretations onto the nation. Instead of facilitating the timely recognition of the opposition chosen by the largest bloc of non government MPs, he hid behind invented procedures and speculative readings of the Standing Orders to delay and frustrate the process. In a system already burdened by an over mighty executive, the last thing Guyana needs is a Speaker who acts as a gatekeeper for partisan convenience.
That same instinct to twist norms in defence of the old order surfaced in the scramble for speaking slots in the Budget 2026 debate. The demoted PNC, no longer the principal opposition in numerical terms, nonetheless jostled to retain the privileges of that status, with one of its MPs boldly asserting that speaking time must be allocated on a “proportional” basis. Yet the Clerk of the National Assembly himself has made clear that any such proportionality principle applies to the distribution of seats and roles on parliamentary committees, not to the Speaker’s discretionary management of the debate. To pretend otherwise is to smuggle a political preference into the chamber dressed up as constitutional law. It is another way of saying to the electorate: “You voted to change the hierarchy, but we will behave as if you did not.”
Nor is Parliament the only arena where the spirit of the constitution is being stretched thin. The executive presidency has continued to treat key constitutional offices as extensions of political will rather than guardians of impartiality. The recent handling of bodies such as the Teaching Service Commission, and the pattern of judicial appointments and non appointments, underline an uncomfortable truth: the President’s pen still looms larger than any principle of balance or consultation. When critical commissions are left in limbo, or filled in ways that appear arbitrary and one sided, and when the upper reaches of the judiciary are kept in a state of engineered vacancy or precarious acting appointments, the message is unmistakable. The letter of the constitution is being manipulated to secure convenience, not confidence.
These are not isolated missteps. Taken together—the Speaker’s creative rule making, the PNC’s attempt to cling to “principal opposition” privilege in defiance of the new numbers, the frozen GECOM opposition seats, the executive’s heavy hand over commissions and the bench—they form a pattern. It is the pattern of a two party dispensation that refuses to accept its demotion to history, using every gap, silence and ambiguity in the 1980 era constitution to blunt the force of the 2025 mandate. The duopoly may have lost its monopoly in the chamber, but it is fighting to preserve it in practice, by way of procedure, precedent and patronage.
The people, however, have already delivered their verdict. By elevating WIN, they have declared the two party dispensation a relic. The dynasty is over in the hearts and minds of citizens, but it still lives on in the clauses, procedures and silences of our supreme law. That is the anomaly we must now confront: a 21st century electorate trapped inside a 20th century power architecture, policed by office holders who are prepared to stretch the rules rather than share the stage. The longer we pretend this is sustainable, the more we invite cynicism and conflict the next time the system is stretched to breaking point.
The way forward is neither mysterious nor radical. It begins with accepting a simple democratic principle: when the people reshape the political landscape, the constitution must be capable of adjusting to that new reality. That means enshrining mechanisms that allow new entrants into the halls of power to be properly represented wherever “government” and “opposition” are given institutional voice – including GECOM, constitutional commissions, parliamentary leadership posts and other high offices that claim to speak for all Guyanese. It means designing tenure and appointment rules that protect independence, not entrenched party privilege, and locking in safeguards so that Speakers and Presidents cannot improvise the law to fit the politics of the day.