Parliamentary issues not debated on merit - Lumumba
"It is not as intellectual as I expected it to be. It is not like the United States of America or Britain where issues are debated on their merit. The objective [of the opposition] is to make the government look bad and not one of correcting and moving an issue forward."
PPP/C backbencher Odinga Lumumba is saddened. He feels the parliamentary opposition is more concerned with scoring political points than dealing with issues. He stressed that the government could be more accommodating, but that the opposition is always looking to put it on the defensive.
Lumumba has strong views about the stipend parliamentarians receive which he derisively dismisses as "not serious". However, he holds the view that the level of pay should be in accordance with the responsibilities the parliamentarians are asked to undertake.
As a consequence, Lumumba says people should enter parliament not so much for the pay but to help develop mankind. The backbenchers' pay should be high enough so that together with facilities such as an office and staff it could enable them to be effective in the representation of the interests of their constituents.
Dr Dalgleish Joseph
He describes his relationship with his colleagues across the aisle as excellent, pointing out there is mutual respect and he says he counts a number of them as his friends.
Lumumba entered parliament in January 1998 and is chairman of the Parliamentary Sector Committee on Natural Resources. He says that because of his good relations with opposition members they get a lot of work done.
He says he can also speak with Ravi Dev, whose party's membership is drawn from just one race. Lumumba thinks this is unconstitutional and should be challenged in court.
Lumumba, who is advisor to the President on empowerment and runs the President's Youth Choice Initiative, is a product of Buxton and a "member on leave" from the PNC, the party which he boasts he grew up in. He took leave from the PNC after the 1992 elections, because of his uneasiness with the amount of power its constitution placed in the hands of the then leader, Desmond Hoyte.
Lumumba joined former PNC deputy leader Hamilton Green, chief political advisor to the late Forbes Burnham, Elvin McDavid, PNC executive member Robert Williams and long-time activists Ramesh Kissoon and Gwen McGowan in forming A Good and Green Guyana (AGGG). At the 1994 municipal elections, AGGG gained the largest block of seats on the Georgetown City Council.
However, its popularity in Georgetown was not replicated in other parts of the country and the party did poorly at the 1997 general elections and did not contest the 2001 elections.
Lumumba parted company with Green over his leadership style and joined the PPP when then PPP leader Cheddi Jagan persuaded him that his dreams and aspirations could be realised under a PPP administration. He campaigned actively for the PPP/C at the 1997 elections and is credited, along with Drs Henry Jeffrey and Roger Luncheon, with increasing the party's votes in Region Four.
Lumumba attended the Buxton Congregational and Plaisance Methodist schools and later Central High School in Georgetown and County High School in Buxton where he came under the influence of Eusi Kwayana. His contemporaries at Central High include Basil Joseph, Valence Williams, Hewley Nelson, Keith Massay, Nandi Ramkarran and Faisal Ferouz.
At Queen's College, New York, Lumumba obtained a BSc degree in Economic Geology in 1973 and in 1975 graduated with an MSc in Mineral Economics from the Colorado School of Mines.
After graduation Lumumba worked with the Land Mines Reclamation Department as a Project Analyst and served on the committee which modernised Colorado's Land Reclamation Act. He also worked with the National Solar Energy Research Institute as a Solar Energy economist, participated in a project looking at the cost of fossil fuel for the US State Department and was the coordinator for Wind Project which involved the identification and assessment of any type of wind machine in the world and to develop a databank.
Lumumba has also worked as a marketing consultant to TCI (a television cable company) and as a general consultant to Gibbs and Hill and later with CITOS, then the second largest trading company in the world, as a consultant identifying market opportunities in the Caribbean.
The Buxton boy was also a political activist in the United States and worked on the political campaigns of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington as the campaign's liaison to the Chicago West Side. He was also chairman of the Energy Task Force for the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as advisor to the National Conference of Black Mayors. He also worked closely with the late Stokely Carmichael and was one of the US coordinators for the Sixth Pan African Congress in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
Dissatisfaction with where his life was at, and a belief that he could make a greater contribution at home than in the US led Lumumba to return to Guyana and he took a job with Gibbs and Hill which had been contracted by the Guyana government to rehabilitate the power company, then called the Guyana Electricity Corporation (GEC). That assignment lasted two years and after that he began casting around for business opportunities. One venture with which he was associated was the proposed purchase of the bauxite company by Gibbs and Hill. He remembered that Gibbs and Hill was a hair's breadth away from inking a deal with the government, when the Planning Ministry threw a spanner in the works.
He remembered that Gibbs and Hill would have paid between US$50 million - US$70 million, assumed all the company's debts and taken care of the entire infrastructure in the Linden area. In return, he said, Gibbs and Hill wanted Mackenzie and Wismar to be declared a free zone in which upwards of some 2,000 jobs would have been created.
Lumumba is married and is the father of four.
Select committee review should be de rigeur for complex bills - Dr Joseph
Dr Dalgleish Joseph is disappointed that many of the more complex and technical bills are not benefiting from the special Select Committee process where they can be given more in-depth study and inputs from both the government and opposition sides of the House.
He asserts that the benefits of this process are well known to all the serious and committed members of the National Assembly.
Dr Joseph says his experience of parliamentary life has been significantly disappointing. Like his colleagues, he feels that the quality of debate from the government benches could be higher. Many of the statements made by PPP government ministers are less than accurate and are a serious deviation from the rules and standing orders of the National Assembly, he says.
His relations with his colleagues across the aisle, Dr Joseph says, are cordial as there is a certain level of mutual respect among parliamentarians.
Dr Joseph is a member of the Parliamentary Sector Committee on Social Services, which is one of the four new standing committees to be established by recent constitutional amendments. As the work of this committee gets fully under way, Dr Joseph expects that it will make significant demands on its members' time. This, he says, will call for significant sacrifices which the members would have to be prepared to make.
The key to doing this, he says, would be for members to manage their time more efficiently so as to provide the quality of representation to their constituents that they expect and deserve.
Like his colleagues, Dr Joseph finds the stipend paid to parliamentarians inadequate. He feels it should be increased, especially for the opposition backbenchers who more often than not have to clean up the bills which the government brings to the National Assembly.
He points out that since 1998, the majority of the amendments to the government bills come from the opposition benches. This is so because the quality of most of the bills presented leaves much to be desired, he says.
Dr Joseph also says that the responsibilities of members of the sector committees require them to undertake field visits, long hours of interaction with personnel from the various ministries including their political heads as well as access to computers and online information. These activities, he says, require special resources some of which the members have now to purchase. Also, the volume of work requires them to spend hours away from their substantive employment and some consideration should be given to this.
Dr Joseph has been a parliamentarian since July 15, 1998. His name was extracted from the PNC list of candidates following the 1997 elections. However, his party did not take up its seats in the National Assembly until after the signing of the St Lucia Statement on July 2, 1998.
He is a Paediatric Surgeon and Head of the Department of Paediatric Surgery at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation. On his return to Guyana from Japan in 1989, where he studied paediatric surgery on a scholarship provided by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency earlier that year, he pioneered the establishment of the Department of Paediatric Surgery at the GPHC in 1989, and Paediatric Surgery as a specialty in Guyana for the first time.
Dr Joseph is a Cuban-trained doctor who graduated in 1982 from the University of Havana, Cuba. He was among the first batch of Guyanese students to study medicine in Cuba. On his return to Guyana in 1982, he worked at the Georgetown Public Hospital as a Government Medical Officer, and by 1985 was appointed a Registrar in the Department of Surgery and the Acting Head of the Accident and Emergency Unit. He returned to Cuba in 1985 to specialise in general surgery and completed that programme in 1988. On his return, he rejoined the staff of the Georgetown Public Hospital.
Since 1989, Dr Joseph has held a number of posts at the Georgetown Public Hospital including Medical Superintendent and Head of the Department of Surgery.
In the run-up to the 1997 general elections, then PNC leader, Desmond Hoyte, renewed an earlier invitation to him to campaign for the PNC and he accepted. He had declined an offer to do so in 1992 as he wanted more time to further establish his medical career and develop his skills as a surgeon.
By 1997 he felt that he had done so and was better able to devote the necessary time and energy to the 1997 elections campaign and all other aspects of the PNC's political agenda.
Dr Joseph is no newcomer to the PNC having been a member of the then Young Socialist Movement from his early teens. He names Robert Corbin, Jeffrey Thomas, Keith Jonas and Phillip Bynoe as his contemporaries in the movement, even though they were older than he.
Even while studying in Cuba, Dr Joseph remained politically active as he was chairman of the party group in Cuba and attended the party's biennial congresses during his undergraduate years.
Dr Joseph is the second of seven children and the eldest surviving, born to his mother Joyce and his father Jeremiah who is now deceased. He was born at Rahaman's Park, East Bank Demerara and his early schooling was at Ascension Lutheran and St Stephen's primary schools and for his secondary education he attended Chatham High School, Guyana Oriental College and Queen's College.
Dr Joseph is married and is the father of four, the eldest of whom is at university in the United States of America. Another child is a third-year business management student. His two younger children are at secondary school.
Besides his rigorous professional and parliamentary schedule, Dr Joseph finds time to teach surgery at the University of Guyana Medical School where he was recently appointed principal tutor in surgery.
Dr Joseph is a Jew and an active member of the Jewish Orthodox Church (Apostolic Faith) and stresses that he believes in Jesus Christ.