In A Nutshell: The Role of the Speaker in a Democracy
12.04.2023
Alain Gordon-Gentil, in his Le Defi interview of 8 April, quotes the late Radhamohun Gujadhur QC as having described a Speaker this way: “C’est un homme qui doit protéger les faibles et la minorité contre les abus de la majorité.” This is the nearest to an understanding of what the Speaker is that we have read in the debate about the degeneration of the role of the Speaker in the Mauritian National Assembly – first with Ms. Hanoomanjee, who was bad enough, and now with Sooroojdev Phokeer. But, the quotation chosen by Gordon-Gentil still misses the mark.
The Speaker’s real role is to uphold the supremacy of Parliament, in particular relative to the Prime Minister and others in the executive.
It is this one fact – that the elected body of Parliament is “supreme” – that gives form to the word “democracy”, and that means we do not still live in some kind of feudal or colonial autocracy.
And it is the role of the Speaker to defend the supremacy of the elected Legislature. A Speaker ensures that the executive – the remnants of the reign of monarch – do not dominate the Legislature, which is, in a democracy, “supreme” precisely because it has been elected by the totality of the people. The Speaker is there to protect the voice of the people.
Most in the debate miss the point completely. They go on and on about the Speaker being an “umpire” as if he was refereeing a football match. And how he should be more “impartial”, again as if he is doing a balancing act. And while Radhamohun Gujadhur gets a bit closer, he still misses the essential, philosophic, point. It is not his role to “protect the weak” or “the minority” in Parliament, but to “protect Parliament”, itself, from the ever-present threat of the executive grabbing more power.
This might mean he often protects the weaker and the minority party or alliance.
Let us see why it is important to understand, and to understand with precision, that this is the role of the Speaker. It helps us decide what demands we make for change, i.e. what program we fight for.
In a Parliamentary democracy, which happens to be the highest stage of democracy one gets under capitalist rule so far, what makes the political system have a claim to being a “democracy” at all is the fact that the supreme power lies with the elected Parliament.
The legislative arm of government – has two features in a democracy: It is elected by the people, and it is and remains the supreme power.
The King and his Cabinet, also known as the “executive arm”, persist, however, in a new guise, even after the end of monarchies, and keep enormous powers until today, even under the parliamentary democracy we live under. The executive arm is no longer hereditary, but emanates instead from the “supreme power” of the legislature. However – and here is the fatal flaw – the Prime Minister is appointed by the President, and not elected by the National Assembly, as he should be for his role to be “democratic”.
He is appointed by the President, after the Queen or Governor General stopped doing so, historically speaking. His Ministers are then, in turn, merely appointed by the Prime Minister. The Cabinet is not even ratified by a vote at the National Assembly. Again, it should be, in order to qualify as democratic.
In order for the persistent archaic autocratic powers of the executive to be curtailed, there are a number of conditions necessary. Some demand vast changes – because of “class society”, the rich constantly corrupt those elected members that have executive powers (the Ministers). They bribe them for tenders and contracts, they fund them and then lobby them for permits and legal frameworks and nominations in their interest, and so on. This will change fundamentally only with a revolution, a revolution that also, at the same time, ends class society.
Other conditions that help “democracy” be less stifled even while under capitalist reign, are things like the right for electors in a constituency to “recall” any elected members of Parliament, including those nominated to the executive, and to do so by means of electoral petition signed up to by, say, 50% of the people, and if recalled, then replaced through a bye-election. The very existence of such a provision would certainly curtail many abuses by Ministers. This change needs a constitutional amendment. LALIT has fought for this for many, many years, and today many parties agree. Mobilization must take form to push this demand.
But, there are other ways, in the meantime, to strengthen Parliament. One is by us all understanding what exactly a Speaker is. And to demand a Speaker fulfill this role.
Former MSM Speaker Ms. Maya Hanoomanjee thought being Speaker was being a “discipline master” in an archaic and unruly primary school. She thought her role was to shout parliamentarians into silence, and, at the same time, to give an extra little advantage to the executive Branch, in particular the Prime Minister, Jugnauth Snr. and then Jugnauth Jnr., with whom, incidentally, she has family ties. She was a former civil servant with the professional deformation of being a stickler for bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is anathema to “democracy”.
Present Speaker Sooroojdev Phokeer is worse still in every way. He sees his role as ensuring that the executive, in particular the Prime Minister, is not bothered by the Opposition, or even by back-benchers, at all. If he has to cut out Parliamentary Questions, or answers, too bad. If he has to suspend elected members, too bad. That is how he sees his role.
In fact, it is worse than that. He does not know where he is, when he stands there in the elected National Assembly. He thinks he is, himself, an important part of the executive, itself. So, he is far from understanding that his role is to protect the elected Legislature and maintain its supremacy, and thus prove that the country is “a democratic state”.
Understanding Parliamentary Democracy
So, the claim of a “parliamentary democracy” to being a form of “democratic State” (as opposed to any other kind of State) lies in its legislature (that is its Parliament or National Assembly) being elected and, in turn, this elected legislature, being the supreme branch of government.
That is the main assumption on which we can all say Mauritius is a “democracy”. There are other addenda possible: that there are political parties that are free to recruit members and take part in elections; that there is the rule of law, meaning once there is a law it applies to all; that there is a separation of powers (Legislature, executive and Judiciary) and so on. But, the main point about being a democracy is that the Legislature is elected and is Supreme.
What this form of democracy is supposed to mean is that the executive is answerable to the elected members of the National Assembly. Its claim to being “democracy” is thus limited to its supreme branch of government being elected by the people, and being supreme. (In fact, in LALIT we call this kind of democracy “bourgeois democracy” to distinguish it from “no democracy”, on the one hand, and “a proper democracy”, on the other, which will only be possible when there are not unequal, warring social classes.)
As Section 1 of the Constitution puts it, “Mauritius shall be a sovereign democratic State which shall be known as the Republic of Mauritius.” The key words, for the purposes of this article, are both “sovereign” – no-one else rules anymore from beyond or from outside – and “democratic” – a State with an elected parliament which is the supreme branch.
The Speaker is the officer elected by the National Assembly, ideally from amongst elected MPs, whose role is to assure that this branch of the State remains the supreme branch, especially relative to the executive. That is what a Speaker does. That is the role of the Speaker. A Speaker has to prevent the National Assembly getting brow-beaten by the Cabinet. He has to do this even though it, this executive, is present within the National Assembly, emanating as it seems to do from the National Assembly in the form of the Prime Minister (appointed by the President) and his Cabinet (appointed in turn by the Prime Minister) being from amongst elected members of the National Assembly.
The Speaker’s role is to ensure that elected MPs that represent the 21 Constituencies of Mauritius, i.e. “elected representatives of the whole of the people”, maintain their supremacy, thus the supremacy of democracy in the bourgeois democratic sense of the word. This would include protecting the weak and the parties that have a minority of seats, as Radhamohun Gujadhur put it, but that flows from the Speaker protecting Parliament as supreme power.
The reality
However, the executive Branch, does not really entirely “emanate” from the National Assembly, as it turns out.
By being “nominated by the President” (who has replaced the Monarch), the Prime Minister, the one with the actual power, ends up also being the direct descendent of reign by an undemocratic, feudal monarchy. So, the Prime Minister gets all the king’s powers to control the whole civil service and any armed and discipline forces and he gets them by being “nominated” by the President.
Both realities – the State being a democracy and the State being a feudal autocracy – exist within the parliamentary democratic system.
And so it is that we have to fight constantly for the National Assembly just to maintain its semblance of supremacy over the other sections of Government.
And this is where the Speaker has a key role. He or she is supposed to prevent the constant drift towards the autocracy re-establishing itself, as it constantly does attempt to do.
Once the President has “named” the Prime Minister, he (the President) becomes the head, or sometimes mere figure-head of the “permanent state”, which has been continuous since French times, through British colonization, through slavery and indenture i.e. the civil service, the police force, as well as the Protector of Slaves that became the Protector of Immigrants that, in turn, became the Labour Inspectorate, and other parts of the Administration.
The power of the National Assembly to remain strong relative to the executive has always depended, in turn, on how mobilized we, the people, in particular the working people, are.
It is us who have to keep the Police in check. We have to keep the bureaucracy in check. We have to keep the Electoral Commission and Commissioner independent. We have to keep the Judiciary relatively independent of the executive. We do this as a society – remember it is a class society, so our power as oppressed classes is limited by class-related laws – and we do it through our elected representatives, on the one hand, and independently via constant mobilization, on the other.
So, all this to explain the significance of LALIT’s transitional demands for more democracy.
The role of the Speaker in maintaining the relative strength of the Legislature is thus key, as you will see:
1. We want to increase the power of the people, and also the power of the people’s elected representatives, relative to the power of the executive.
To do this, we propose simple changes to the existing parliamentary democracy in Mauritius:
(i) Introduction of the right of recall, i.e. a system of electoral petitions by electors being granted the constitutional right to revoke one or all of the MPs in their respective constituencies from the National Assembly, and to set off the process towards a by-election.
(ii) Introduction of a system whereby, after counting is over in general elections, the National Assembly sits for the election of a Speaker, who we propose must be one of the elected members of the National Assembly, and then the election of the Prime Minister by all MPs; the new Prime Minister then puts to the National Assembly his Cabinet list for a vote.
(iii) There will also need to be a system introduced so that the elected members can also revoke, by a resolution, any Cabinet Minister, the Prime Minister, or any number of Cabinet Members, to provoke bye-elections. Then the newly re-enforced National Assembly will have, and can maintain, some power over the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
These amendments show the importance of the independent Electoral Commission and Commissioner, for elections and revocations to be legitimate, and the importance of a Speaker understanding the role of the office, as protector of the legislature from the executive. The demand for these changes is that kind of demand that helps us all understand how democracy, proper democracy, might one day function. When there is no longer a “dictatorship by the capitalist class” – which is the underpinning lie of “bourgeois democracy” – proper democracy can begin to flourish – in all civil and economic and social life.
But meanwhile, we need constantly to keep the existing democratic rights we have from being eroded. During the Brexit debates in the UK parliament, the then speaker John Bercow gave the world a lesson on the independence of the Speaker in parliamentary democracy.
But curiously, it is a truism that it is often revolutionaries like us in LALIT who, at the same time as struggling for more democracy than Parliamentary democracy offers, end up being the only force leading the struggle to maintain the little bourgeois democracy that exists so far. Other just cry “BLD” and band together with anyone who wants to get rid of the incumbent. Just as they ran often mindless campaigns first against Navin Ramgoolam and even against his consort, then against Pravind Jugnauth and even against his wife.
We need to work towards more democracy in a down-to-earth way.
The Dangers in Mauritius now
In fact, there is a tendency right now in Mauritius towards the executive becoming more and more powerful. That is what we are seeing under Pravind Jugnauth and his MSM reign. This is why LALIT has put in a Constitutional Case to challenge the new law on “citizenship”. This law gives the Prime Minister new powers to kick out citizens, and not even have to explain why. This is why we mobilize and act against it.
This is why we, in LALIT, call on Prime Minister Jugnauth to at once withdraw his offer of a lease on Diego Garcia to the USA for its military base there. The executive should not be able, under any circumstances, to sign away part of the country, just as it ought not to be able to banish its own citizens.
Almost every demand that LALIT has is one for more democracy for all.
A Symptom of the Drift to Autocracy
There ought to be a national website, and one would expect the National Assembly to be the home page – with an explanation of how the NA works, and details about elections, and then also about elected Municipalities and Village Councils and their District Councils. This would reflect democracy. Then, the other two branches of Government – the executive Branch with all its Ministries, and Judicial Branch with its Court system – should have their sub-pages.
LALIT has previously published an article on this (www.lalitmauritius.org) in which we explain how the Jugnauth Government had a website that humiliated the National Assembly by filing it under the ridiculous sub-heading of the Government Directory (executive Directory) “Other Institutions”. This comes after “Ministries”, after other “Departments” and then after “Parastatal Organizations”! And the humiliation goes on. When you open the pathetic little heading “Other Institutions”, the National Assembly falls between the anti-corruption commission ICAC and the National Audit Office!
Now you have to look for mauritiusassembly.govmu.org which grammatically means that the “mauritius assembly” – to which the address refers – is part of “govmu” or the Government of Mauritius. So, the executive is exposed as the supreme power.
The ideological influence of this kind of “derive” towards suppressing democracy is quite real. Young people using the internet will, quite naturally, if they are bright and see the structure of the web-pages, come to believe that the National Assembly is a tiny little “other institution” well below everything else. Of, part of Government. In fact, it is fast becoming this. This is what Ms. Hanoomanjee and then Mr. Phokeer have exposed.
We have to mobilize to prevent this dangerous drift towards autocracy, starting by understanding exactly what democracy is, and how to maintain and deepen it, at the same time as we struggle to change the entire system.
LALIT
Keywords: Parliament, MSM, political theory
