Venezuela's National Assembly took a deeply worrying and potentially very dangerous step last week when it voted unanimously to give President Hugo Chávez power to rule by decree for 18 months.

So, Mr. Chávez will have unimpeded authority to push through the economic and political changes, which he says are necessary to deepen the Bolivarian Revolution, which he promised to accelerate after his landslide re-election triumph in December. We can expect nationalisation, broader state control of the Venezuelan economy, and ultimately, a change in the Venezuelan constitution to remove term limits for presidents. This would allow Mr. Chávez to run again for the presidency in 2012, if, indeed, an election, at least in the sense that we understand, is necessary by then.

The vast majority of Venezuelan people, who are mainly poor, may, at this point, have no fundamental problem with Mr. Chávez's actions. It is they who, since 1999, have consistently given him huge mandates to govern and, when he deems fit, re-engineer the country's constitution. He has reciprocated with massive social welfare programmes.

Many people in countries like our own will also empathise with Mr. Chávez's revolutionary zeal. Not only have we benefited from Mr. Chávez's economic largesse, but there is this affinity with a leader with the audacity and, as Mr. Chávez now enjoys, the economic clout to give a bloody nose to the powerful centres of the North. Moreover, as much as Jamaica and others have signed on to the Washington consensus of neo-liberal economic reforms, few are really convinced that the project can deliver sustained economic growth and lift the majority of our populations out of poverty. Indeed, closet socialists abound.

checks and balances

But whatever may be Mr. Chávez's real motivation, however, altruistic it may be, there are good and profound reasons for the Venezuelan people to give pause, deeply consider and to ask for a reversal of what has been purportedly done in their name. There are good reasons for checks and balances in liberal, democratic political processes, where the right of the individual is paramount and leaders are held accountable. When there is no accountability, the route to authoritarianism and tyranny can be short. In the absence of mechanisms that insist on accountability from the leader, the citizenry must depend on the benevolence of the leader, which is what the Venezuelan legislature has ensured by ceding almost all powers to President Chávez.

The Venezuelan Opposition, of course, must take some of the blame. Faced with almost certain defeat in last month's election, it contrived all kinds of reasons to boycott the poll, ensuring that President Chávez's supporters gained total control of the Assembly, opening the door to the rubber-stamping of its actions. During last week's vote, there was not even token resistance. In that regard, the Opposition, which makes much noise about Mr. Chávez's policies and direction, failed that segment of the Venezuelan population that does not support the president.

There are other reasons, too, why Venezuelans should be concerned. Capitalism, in our countries, may not, up to now, have had great success in lifting our populations out of poverty, but neither has socialism done much, except in the delivery of impenetrable tomes and hot rhetoric. And we know governments are rarely any good at running businesses, except, usually, into the ground.

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