The myths about a shared government

Lately we have been hearing a lot about shared governments, without any explanation what is shared Govt. What the writers mean when they mention the term shared government?

Most democratic countries have shared government, with the exception of the communist states. Cuba is one of those states where there is democracy (technically) but no shared government.

The U.S.A form of shared government is Federalism, which was a flaw in design by the founding fathers and a last resort to keep the states from breaking apart and collapse the United States of America before its creation. The only Politician I am aware of in Guyana who is pushing for Federalism is Ravi Dev and I have a strong feeling, that’s not the version of shared government recent and past letter writers are talking about.

The Guyanese system is very simple, all the parties put forward their party political platform and the people go out and choose which platform they like best. Eric Phillips quoted Dr. Jagan as saying “if the PPP were to put a broom up as its presidential candidate, the PPP would still win”, without quite understanding the fundamentals of Guyanese politics. In Guyana the Presidential Candidate is not as important as the Party Platform. If the party put forward a strong platform, that party will win regardless of the presidential candidate and Dr. Jagan did had a lot of confidence in the PPP.

After the people approve the party platform by popular vote, the winning party gets to choose members of their government to carry out the party promises and indirectly carrying out the will of the majority. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Any attempt to use “share government” within the executive branch would disrupt democracy and go against the platform choose by a majority of the Guyanese people.

At the start of my letter I said that Guyana does have a shared government and that occurs in parliament where parties’ representation is proportional to votes gained. The members of parliament would be the equivalent to the American senators and congressmen, while the Guyanese ministers would be the equivalent to the Americans secretary (Secretary of Defense, State etc).

Anyone who understand the way the systems work would have a very hard time calling for “shared government”, because it is not only impractical but its also undemocratic in this case. Enemies of democracy you have ruined this land once and your scams shall never work again.

Thank you,

Asif Mohamed