Clerk of the National Assembly, Sherlock Isaacs, has explained the formula that was used to allocate seats to the parliamentary parties for the various Parliamentary Committees. He said the formula that was used last week is not new.

Forward Guyana Leader and Member of Parliament, Amanza Walton- Desir, was excluded from all of the parliamentary committees, despite being nominated by both the WIN party and the APNU.

A mathematical formula was used and that formula took into consideration the number of Parliamentary seats that a party holds in the National Assembly.

At the last General elections, the Forward Guyana Movement won just one seat in the 65-member Assembly, having secured just over 4000 votes.

While not detailing the method, the Clerk said the method used to determine committee seats has been used for decades and was designed to ensure that the composition of Parliamentary Committees reflects, as closely as possible, the balance of political representation in the National Assembly.

He said the allocation of Committee seats is therefore based on the number of seats held by each political party in Parliament.

The Clerk also noted that the established principle is enshrined in Standing Order 94 of the National Assembly Rules book which States that every Select Committee shall be constituted to ensure that as far as possible that the balance of parties in the National Assembly is reflected in the Committee.

In a recent video statement, Walton noted that while there is a Parliamentary procedure, there is also precedence, pointing out that the Government had supported both Mr. Lennox Shuman and Dr. Asha Kissoon to be Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly in the previous Parliament despite their extremely low vote count.

 But the Clerk noted that the allocation formula is not a matter of discretion.

“The allocation formula is therefore not a matter of discretion or political preference, but rather a longstanding parliamentary mechanism intended to ensure fairness and proportional representation in the work of the Parliamentary Committees,” the Clerk explained.

The Clerk noted too that while efforts are usually made to reflect the balance of parties in the National Assembly, finite size of the committees means that the perfect proportionality is not always mathematically possible.

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