With the main PNC/R boycotting Parliament for the presentation of the 2002 budget, the subsequent debate and the consideration of the estimates - seminal sessions of the highest law making body of the land - were reduced to a farce.

Several issues have arisen following recent events.

Boycotting of Parliament is a legitimate recourse for opposition parties and the ruling party is familiar with this method of applying pressure. In a recent press release, the ruling PPP/C labelled the boycott "An attempt to subvert democracy", implying that the PNC/R move was a bid at subversion. The opposition PNC/R clearly feels that it has been unable to evince a satisfactory response from the governing party on a handful of issues including the chairing and composition of the parliamentary sectoral committees and the parliamentary management committee. Boycotting of Parliament therefore was used as an opportunity to ratchet up its concerns. But it was not only the PNC/R which had grave concerns. Both GAP/WPA and ROAR issued statements simultaneously with the PNC/R walkout decrying the poor functioning of Parliament. GAP/WPA MP Sheila Holder referred to what she said were dozens of questions tendered for ministers to answer which months later have not been entered on the Notice Paper. Several motions had been ignored and Members' Days not convened among other shortcomings. A rubber stamp was how ROAR's leader Ravi Dev described the institution though he himself did not walk out of Parliament.

Perhaps if the TUF MP was not in the Cabinet, his party might also have had something to say on the functioning of Parliament. In an earlier press release, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Reepu Daman Persaud had denied charges the institution had become moribund and had said that since the new Parliament began in May 2001 there had been 20 sittings. That is roughly two sittings per month and clearly inadequate for a robust legislative agenda and the other business that faces the country including the tidying up of the Constitution and an ongoing review of it.

The government and the Parliamentary Affairs Minister have much more work to do in convincing the opposition parties that Parliament will be made a truly deliberative and vibrant body and that they will have an important say in the arranging of its business.

The second issue is the intractability of this dispute over the parliamentary committees. A part of the problem, of course, is the shoddy wording of the constitutional article dealing with the chairmanship of these bodies. (How many more of these potential minefields might there be in the reformed Constitution?) That aside, resolving the matter has taken on the dimensions of a mini crisis over a number of months.

While things have bogged down at the level of senior party functionaries, the input of President Jagdeo and Opposition Leader Hoyte has also failed to yield progress. The President has an upbeat view of the results of the dialogue while Mr Hoyte's apprehends it so differently that his party has opted to suspend the talks.

It calls into question the depth of the discourse and trust between the two leaders and more critically, whether the two parties can engage each other in sustained and productive dialogue given their track record. But they must find a way to sustain the dialogue. Could local mediation be given a role in this process? For example, in determining what is a fair compromise? Disputes like these should not drag on endlessly. They greatly diminish the confidence of the citizenry in the abilities of the two main parties to find mature solutions to areas of contention. The President, the Opposition leader and their parties must make a renewed effort to resolve this disagreement which has frozen the functioning of the enormously important constitutional commissions.

Thirdly, the nature of the debate on the budget is one that should be rethought. Though the absence of the PNC/R MPs accentuated it even more this year, the "debate" was essentially the occasion for a tiresome rehash of the "successes" and plans of the government. And if they were present, the opposition MPs would have offered their own worn out arguments. Having the customary three to five days of these presentations laced with wooden rhetoric has become completely unnecessary and perhaps there should be a revisiting of the Standing Orders. Many of the MPs had a lot to say about the suspended dialogue and other political issues even though Standing Order 61 says that the debate "shall be confined to the financial and economic state of the country and the general principles of government policy and administration as indicated by the budget speech and the estimates". There is very little of worth in these broad presentations that the ministers or the opposition MPs have not repeated umpteen times prior to the budget.

What is much more useful, is the examination of the estimates of expenditure when intelligent opportunities arise for MPs to skewer the budget and to ask questions on how and why money was spent on particular projects. It could have been an early opportunity for an intense grilling of the relevant minister on the B&K contract for the failed East Demerara Water Conservancy. Perhaps, more days could be set aside for this cut and thrust and MPs with responsibility for the various regions and ministries could devote more time to a careful consideration of what has been allotted and what was spent in the previous years. The general response to the budget speech could then be limited to a few speakers on each side. The real essence of a disquisition on the budget is to tease out its virtues or shortcomings and this is best done in sorting through its devilish details.