Recently, the Speaker of the House of Representatives has been thrust back into the limelight with her latest ruling that effectively protected the Attorney General and prevented the country from learning where, to whom and how much money was paid by the State to lawyers hired by the Government to deal with the myriad legal matters that need to be dealt with every day. In essence, the Attorney General's argument was that some of the information being requested ought not to be divulged because of privacy and other issues.
The only problem here with the arguments raised by the Attorney General and endorsed by the Speaker was that in October 2016 the same Attorney General with the same Speaker in the chair gleefully went to town with details of how much his (UNC) predecessor had spent on lawyers and even went so far as to give complete details of the amount of fees paid to each lawyer. Now that the shoe is on the other foot it seems that the exact same type of information being requested is not to be allowed and the Speaker (who has the final say in these matters) appears to be only too happy to side with the Government.
The other problem is that everybody remembers when at the end of January 2020 a UNC Parliamentarian (Dr. Tim Gopeesingh) tried and failed to have a motion to discuss the looming COVID pandemic heard as a definite matter of urgent public importance. The Speaker said that in her opinion the matter did not qualify; in other words, there was nothing urgent for the Parliament to discuss. Of course, subsequent events have proven how tragically wrong she was!
Traditionally a Speaker is supposed to be above partisan politics and is there to guide the deliberations of the House in a fair and equitable manner, She/he is NOT there to protect a Government from any thing that the Government may or may not want to do. But one gets the most unfortunate impression that that is exactly how Mrs. Annisette-George (the current Speaker) sees her role. Certainly, her performance as Speaker has given rise to multiple impressions and accusations of bias.
As the presiding officer the Speaker is the interpreter of the rules and procedures of the House, and has the authority to control and regulate the course of debate and to maintain order. But when the general population gets the overwhelming impression that the Speaker is a mere puppet and will do anything that the Government wants, our democracy is in trouble. Because when the PNM loses (and it will one of these days) and the UNC put in an obviously biased presiding officer it will not be good enough nor will it be acceptable for them to say to the PNM "well all yuh did it". And that is exactly what they will say.
No. This nonsense must stop, and stop now. Mrs. Annisette-George has debased her position as Speaker and for the sake of our little democracy she ought to be replaced immediately with a more neutral Speaker. Don't do it and see what happens with this little democracy of ours. And this has nothing to do with PNM/UNC politics but everything to do with OUR country. There are many ways to arrive at the door of a dictatorship. One of the ways is to have a biased presiding officer in the House of Representatives - and we simply cannot afford that.
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