Phased Reform, Permanent Damage: How Guyana’s Constitution Is Being Held Hostage

A Response to AG Nandlall views on Electoral Reform

Part 2 of 2

The Constraints That Must Be Named

To achieve genuine constitutional reform in Guyana, the following structural barriers must be surmounted — not managed, not deferred, but confronted:

First: The self-amending trap.

The Constitution can only be meaningfully reformed by the very Parliament that benefits from its current configuration. The PPP/C holds a majority. The National Assembly — over which the ruling People’s Progressive Party has control — will be called upon to reform itself. No ruling party in history has eagerly reformed itself out of advantage. This requires, at minimum, a cross-party constitutional compact, international witnessing, and a referendum mechanism that returns ultimate authority to the people rather than the legislature.

Second: The closed-list party capture problem.

Because Guyanese voters vote for party slates rather than individual candidates, every MP in the National Assembly owes their seat not to a constituency but to a party executive. This fundamentally corrupts the reform dynamic: MPs who vote against the party line on constitutional amendments risk being dropped from future lists. The reform of the electoral system is therefore a prerequisite to the reform of everything else — but it is also the reform the governing party is least likely to initiate.

Third: GECOM’s structural incapacity.

The Carter Center has long recommended that Guyana reform GECOM’s structure to increase its independence, effectiveness, and professionalism, and to reduce the direct influence of Guyana’s two leading political parties. The current appointment formula embeds partisan rivalry into the Commission’s DNA. Any reform of GECOM that does not break that formula at the root — replacing party-aligned appointees with genuinely independent commissioners selected through a transparent, civil society-vetted process — will merely reproduce the problem under a new name.

Fourth: The transparency vacuum.

Meetings of the commissioners are closed to the public and observers, and there is no public record of the agenda, minutes, or votes and decisions taken. This creates a vacuum that generates suspicion and can be filled with disinformation. A reform commission that deliberates in secret is not building public confidence — it is undermining it. Every session must be open, minuted, and published. Every draft recommendation must be released for public comment before finalisation.

Fifth: The oil-wealth distortion.

Strengthening Guyana’s democracy while the nation’s oil wealth booms is not merely an opportunity — it is an existential test. Resource wealth historically accelerates the consolidation of executive power. A government with access to oil revenues has less need for parliamentary approval, less dependence on a diversified tax base, and less accountability to the citizenry. Constitutional reform must therefore include robust natural resource governance provisions — transparent sovereign wealth fund oversight, parliamentary approval of major contracts, and independently audited oil revenue reporting — or else the Constitution, once reformed, will be hollowed out by economic reality within a generation.

The Path Forward: What Alacrity Actually Requires

Moving forward from a constitution under executive duress requires more than goodwill. It requires architecture — institutional, political, and civic — that does not depend on the goodwill of the executive in the first place.

Parliament must be reconvened on a fixed, publicised schedule with constitutional and electoral reform as standing agenda items. No prorogation, no indefinite suspension, no Speaker exercising unchecked discretion to shelve the people’s business. If Article 184(1) enables such abuse, then its amendment must be the first item on the reform agenda, not the last.

The Constitutional Reform Commission must publish, within sixty days, a timetable for completing its mandate, a schedule of national consultations open to the public, and its first periodic report to the National Assembly as required by Article 119A. If the Commission cannot meet that standard, its membership must be reconstituted with a clear mandate and a binding deadline.

The amendment process must include a referendum pathway. Constitutional changes of fundamental importance — the electoral system, GECOM’s structure, the powers of the President, the rights of citizens — should not be decided solely by a Parliament elected under the very rules being changed. The people of Guyana must be the final authors of their own constitutional settlement.

Civil society, the media, and the legal profession must treat the Carter Center’s June 2026 visit not as the government’s opportunity to perform compliance, but as the nation’s opportunity to hold the government accountable before international witnesses. Submissions must be prepared. Failures must be documented. The international community’s attention is finite; when it moves on, the government’s incentive to act moves with it.

Conclusion: The Covenant Cannot Wait

Phased reform is acceptable only if the phases are visible, bounded, and moving toward a definable end. What Guyana currently has is not a phase — it is a holding pattern, maintained at altitude indefinitely, while the democratic infrastructure below continues to deteriorate.

The Constitution is not the government’s document. It is the nation’s covenant. It belongs to the cane-cutter in Berbice, the fisherwoman in Essequibo, the young professional in Georgetown who left the polls in 2020 not knowing whether her vote would count. They are all still waiting. They cannot afford to wait through another election cycle, another round of manifesto promises, another commission without a deadline.

Reform must move with alacrity not because the Carter Center says so, but because the people of Guyana have already paid too high a price in broken trust. Phased reform is acceptable only if it is visibly, and rapidly, moving toward completion. Anything less is not reform at all. It is the slow annexation of democracy by the executive — and the most dangerous feature of that annexation is how unremarkable it has been made to appear.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.