Nov 02, 2025
(Kaieteur News) – The Elections Commission did not fall from heaven. It came from the messy compromises of men. The so-called Carter-Price Formula, that tired but enduring offspring of the 1990s political crisis, was not meant to enshrine aloof neutrality; it was meant to broker peace between two parties locked in perpetual suspicion.
Jimmy Carter came in 1991 and reminded Guyana’s political leaders of their inability to trust themselves. So, under the guiding hand of Jimmy Carter, the PPP and the PNC agreed to a Commission that was not purely technical but political — deliberately so — so that both sides might have confidence in the process by seeing themselves reflected in it.
Under this arrangement, the choice of Chairperson became a ritual of conditional consensus. The President, still head of state, would appoint the Chairperson, but only from a list of six “fit and proper” persons submitted by the Leader of the Opposition. It was a dance of mutual recognition, a cautious waltz of power and restraint. The President’s hand moved, but it moved only because the Opposition Leader had supplied the steps.
Then came the six Commissioners: three on the President’s deliberate judgment, three on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition. Equal halves of a divided whole. The intention was not that these Commissioners would rise above the political order but that they would balance it. It was, in essence, a peace treaty disguised as an institution.
To say, therefore, that the Commissioners “belong to no one” is to misunderstand the nature of the compromise. They are not party agents, true, but neither are they creatures of abstraction. They are constitutional expressions of political representation. The Commission is not apolitical. Its legitimacy lies in the equilibrium between the two great forces of Guyanese political life — government and opposition, each wary of the other, each watching the other’s hand on the scales.
The Constitution, when read with a sense of history, makes this plain. Article 161(1) is the embodiment of that formula: a President who acts “in his own deliberate judgment” for three appointments, and a President who acts “on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition” for the other three. The symmetry is deliberate. It does not merely tolerate political division; it institutionalises it.
Those who now argue that the Opposition-nominated commissioners enjoy some unconditional permanence, as if they were life peers of a Westminster order, mistake tenure for entitlement. The Constitution gives them security of office so long as the structure that legitimises their appointment remains intact — that is, three from the Government’s side, three from the Opposition’s. The balance is not decorative; it is essential. Remove the Opposition’s ability to advise, to nominate, and you collapse the entire Carter-Price architecture into a one-sided contraption.
It is true that, for nearly three decades, no one has had reason to disturb the pattern. The two main parties have taken turns occupying the seats of power. The Opposition of one day becomes the Government of the next, and in that continuity, there has been no pressure to test the limits of the Carter-Price formula. In 2015, APNU+AFC came to power. In 2020, when the pendulum swung back, the People’s Progressive Party found itself in the seat of Presidency. In 2015, the PPP was the Opposition. In 2020, it was the APNU.
But times change, as they always do. The present Leader of the Opposition is not of the same mould as those before him. He is neither PNC nor PPP.
If we are to remain faithful to the constitutional logic of the Carter-Price Formula, then his authority must mean something. The right to advise the President on the appointment of three Commissioners is his in accordance with the Carter- Price formula.
If the formula is to live, not merely survive as a relic of 1992, then the Leader of the Opposition — whoever he is — must possess the right to nominate his own three Commissioners. Otherwise, the “Opposition side” of the Commission becomes a fiction, an inheritance of ghosts. What sense does it make for the Constitution to speak of “acting on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition” if that advice becomes meaningless when the Leader changes?
The Chairperson stands apart. That office, chosen through the peculiar alchemy of consensus, has its own sanctity. Once selected, the Chair is insulated from the political tides. The stability of that role is necessary; it anchors the institution. But the Commissioners are not of the same cloth. Their presence is justified by political balance, and balance is a dynamic, not a monument.
The six Commissioners of the Elections Commission occupy offices that, while constitutionally protected from arbitrary dismissal, are of a structurally different character from that of the Chairperson. Their appointment is expressly political in design: three are appointed by the President in his own deliberate judgment, and three are appointed by the President acting on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition. Their legitimacy, therefore, derives from the balance of representation—the deliberate equilibrium between government and opposition built into the Carter-Price Formula. Their tenure cannot be viewed in isolation from that equilibrium.
The constitutional structure contemplates a Commission composed of these two political halves, and the continuing authority of each set of Commissioners depends upon that configuration being maintained. Their “security of tenure” exists, therefore, within a relational framework: it does not elevate them to the level of autonomous constitutional officers in the manner of the Chairperson.
The Chairperson’s office stands apart as the singular, nonpartisan head of the Commission. That person’s tenure is secured in the same manner as the heads of other independent constitutional bodies—removable only for misbehaviour or incapacity, and only after a tribunal process under Article 225. The six Commissioners, on the other hand, are instruments of the constitutional balance itself. To treat their tenure as identical to the Chairperson’s is to ignore the political architecture from which their authority arises. Their protection is functional, not absolute, intended to ensure fairness within a balanced structure, not to confer permanence beyond it.
To cling to the idea that Opposition-nominated Commissioners are irremovable, regardless of who leads the Opposition, is to strip the formula of its vitality. The Commission was not designed to be frozen in one moment of political history; it was designed to reflect the living opposition of ideas and parties. To deny a new Leader of the Opposition the right to name his commissioners is to deny him the constitutional role that the Carter-Price Formula was built to secure.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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