Consultation À La Carte.

Consultation À La Carte

OPINION BY : Staff Writer – August 2026

The President consults promptly on three vacant commissions. On the two judicial offices Guyana has waited twenty years to fill, he has yet to write at all.

P resident Irfaan Ali wants Guyanese to know he takes the Constitution seriously. “Wherever consultation is required in accordance with the Constitution,” he told reporters on Tuesday, “you can be assured that I will fulfill my mandate.” The occasion for the assurance was a genuine one: through Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira, the President has initiated consultation with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed on three constitutional bodies whose membership had lapsed — the Judicial Service Commission, the Local Government Commission, and the Public Service Commission.

By the letter of the process, this looks like the Constitution working as designed. The JSC’s life expired July 13; nine days later, Teixeira wrote proposing the reappointment of retired Justice Carl Singh under Article 198(2). The Local Government Commission Act required three opposition nominees; Mohamed, after consulting APNU’s Aubrey Norton and Forward Guyana’s Amanza Walton, delivered them — Leola Narine and Leslyn Lowe from WIN, Nicholas Chesney from Forward Guyana. The Public Service Commission slate — Maurice Gajadhar, Meleita Bovell, Leila Ramson — was proposed and acknowledged in turn. Three letters, three responses, three commissions moving toward being properly constituted. Whatever one thinks of the individual nominees, the mechanics of consultation were followed.

Which is exactly why what’s missing from that list is so conspicuous.

Mohamed said it plainly: consultation has proceeded on the three commissions, but the President “has not initiated consultation on the substantive appointment of a Chancellor and Chief Justice.” Guyana has gone without a substantive Chancellor since 2005 and without a substantive Chief Justice since Carl Singh — the same Carl Singh now being proposed for the JSC — stepped down from acting as Chancellor in 2017 after twelve years in the role. Justice Ian Chang acted as Chief Justice for fifteen years before that. The current arrangement, with Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire and Justice Navindra Singh both acting, is simply the latest chapter in an impasse now past twenty years old.

Article 127(1) sets out exactly the same mechanism as the commissions the President just moved on: appointment by the President, “acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.”

It is not a more complicated provision than Article 198(2). It does not require different machinery, a different minister, or a different letter-writing process.

Guyana’s own courts have already confirmed there is no legal barrier to the President initiating it at will — a 2023 High Court ruling declined to find that the delay amounted to a dereliction of constitutional duty, but pointedly directed that the political actors involved act with “all convenient speed.”

Three years on, “convenient speed” has yet to arrive.

The pattern is not new, and it is not partisan in a way that lets the President off the hook. When Aubrey Norton held the LOO seat, he was invited to consult on the same two positions and, by his own account, declined — calling the exercise a “waste of time” because he did not believe genuine consultation would follow.

Norton’s reasoning deserves scrutiny of its own; refusing an invitation is not the same as never receiving one. But Mohamed has now held the office for more than six months, and the record shows no comparable invitation extended to him. Asked directly about it, the President’s position has reportedly been that a letter written to a previous Opposition Leader does not automatically carry over to his successor — a technical distinction that, notably, did not stop the administration from moving briskly on three commissions with  different opposition leaderships in the same stretch of time.

That contrast is the story. It is one thing to argue, as the Attorney General has in court, that the President is entitled to sequence his constitutional obligations — commissions with vacant seats first, offices that are “occupied and persons are functioning in them” later.

It is another thing to watch that sequencing hold, letter after letter, for every seat except the two that carry the most institutional weight and the least security of tenure for whoever holds them.

A commissioner serves a fixed term. An acting Chancellor or acting Chief Justice serves at the pleasure of whoever keeps them there — a standing incentive, structural rather than personal, for any Executive to prefer the acting arrangement over the substantive one. Twenty years of unbroken continuity in that preference, across administrations, is not proof of a single conspiracy.

It is proof of a mechanism that consistently rewards inaction, regardless of who is in office to benefit from it.

None of this requires reaching for the more explosive allegations now circulating about how the last serious attempt at these appointments actually unfolded — the claims that a sitting CCJ President personally pressed a former Opposition Leader toward a government-preferred slate, or that Justice Cummings-Edwards’s own departure from the acting Chancellorship was less a request than a push. That history is serious enough to warrant its own reckoning, and this news outlet  has been tracking it as such. It does not need to be imported into this piece to make the point that stands on Tuesday’s letters alone: a President who wants credit for constitutional fidelity should be judged by his least convenient obligations, not his easiest ones.

The Leader of the Opposition has the stronger position here, and he should use it. Mohamed does not need to wait for an invitation that has not come. Nothing in Article 127 requires the President to write first any more than nothing in Article 198 required him to write first on the JSC — except that in this case, he already did, to someone else, over a different name. The Opposition Leader should put the President on record: initiate the request himself, in writing, and force a public answer to why the seats that most need a permanent occupant have waited the longest.

Twenty years is not a queue. It’s a choice, renewed every year no one is made to explain it.

— The Board