Dr Peter deGroot, the chairman of the Social Partners grouping, which launched an initiative to break the impasse in the Jagdeo/Hoyte dialogue last year, blames suspicion and distrust of its motives for its failure.

But he says that the distrust in the end inured to the benefit of the country as the government realised it could not allow a third force, such as the Social Partners, to become reality and began to implement the constitutional reforms and to engage the opposition in meaningful discussions.

DeGroot says a “major weakness” of the current Jagdeo/Corbin engagement is the “lack of an independent group to monitor the implementation of the Joint Communiqué measures, combined with the lack of an effective secretariat dedicated to the implementation of these measures.”

Speaking to a luncheon audience of diplomats resident in Guyana last month, deGroot said there was a “perception in one political camp that the Social Partners Group was biased towards the other camp and therefore resulted in the initiative being viewed with increasing suspicion as the process developed.”

To have overcome this hurdle he said that the group “would have had to broaden its membership to include representation from other groups from within civil society, such as the Religious Community, Youth Groups, the Human Rights Association and others.”

“In theory this sounds an easy thing to do, but in practice it was extremely difficult in the Guyanese society. For example, there is no one group that represents the Religious Community or Youth and since all wanted to be represented then this would have developed into a group that would have been too large to accomplish anything.”

The second difficulty, deGroot identified, as what Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon had said were his “significant problem with groups like the Social Partners, who had not developed through any national electoral process”.

He explained that during the group’s last encounter with the Government, PPP executive “Ms (Gail) Teixeira attempted to accuse me of being biased towards the opposition, in an attempt to derail the process.” He said the move did not succeed as “Dr (Henry) Jeffrey strongly disagreed with her.”

De Groot said that the perception that the group could possibly develop into a third political force was the reason why “the government attempted to block the initiative whenever it could” when the Social Partners attempted to set up a “secretariat with support from the Donor community and to include in our mandate assisting with the implementation of the Constitutional Reform measures, which the Government had failed to attempt to do.”

He said an independent monitoring group would represent not only civil society in its broadest sense but also the diplomatic community which would not only increase the level of comfort of both the government and opposition but also benefit from the increased credibility arising from its involvement.

Also because of the involvement of the diplomatic community and the broadest representation of the Guyanese society, the grouping would be less likely to be considered as a potential third political force.

He added that an independent grouping would have the “potential of being able to develop into a secretariat that can not only assist with the monitoring of the implementation of the Joint Communiqué measures but also widen the dialogue process to include not only the two major political parties, but all the parliamentary political parties as well as civil society in general (an original Social Partner concept).”

As a consequence, he recommended that the leaders of the business community and members of the diplomatic community should team up “to keep the establishment of this monitoring group on track so that we can assist in a major way on the maintenance of political stability in Guyana, which is probably the single most important criterion if Guyana is to continue to develop and survive into the future”.