People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Presidential Candidate Irfaan Ali said the Party wanted to restore a sense of hope amongst Guyanese – a hope that was lost after the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) coalition’s failure to fulfil promises made to the people on the campaign trail.
Speaking at a fundraising dinner on Saturday at his Leonora, West Coast Demerara (WCD) home, Ali told the gathering that the event was not just to raise funds but also to serve as a platform to hear from the people in order to deliver a future that could be benefited from and enjoyed by everyone.
A section of the fundraising dinner held on Saturday at Ali’s Leonora, WCD residence
While noting that the PPP/C during its time in office, had done much to develop the country and improve the lives of Guyanese, Ali acknowledged that the Party did make mistakes and being on the outside now has clearly highlighted those gaps.
“So our commitment to you tonight is filling those gaps, correcting those mistakes and building a future in which all of us can be part of…,” he stated.
According to the PPP/C Presidential Candidate, the first thing in this process is to restore the lost hope of the country’s population.
“Today, a lot of people, young people, and businesses are feeling a sense of hopelessness and when hope is removed from society, aspirations are removed. That’s why we brought you here, so we can heard from you because we don’t want to give you false promises and false hope, because we have seen what false promises and false hope have done to our country and our people,” Ali asserted.
He outlined that the country needed a hope that was built on trust: trust of the people in their government and vice versa. Ali pointed out that if Guyana was a Private Sector company, or a developed state and the coalition Government was a company, it would have been sued for having made promises and creating hope that caused people to invest in a particular way when in fact, it had no interest in fulfilling those hopes and promises. He said this was what the coalition’s manifesto did.
“The manifesto of the APNU/AFC created a hope that was built on lies. A hope that was never meant to be achieved, but was meant as a marketing tool to gain votes and this is one of the regions that suffered severely as a result of those false promises,” he contended.
According to Ali, Region Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara) has been mostly affected through the rice and sugar industries. He said rice farmers, millers, thousands of sugar workers, and even communities have suffered immensely because of the coalition Government.
“People’s lives have been trampled upon, parents finding it difficult to sending their children to school – all based on false hope and promises. So the hope we are talking about here tonight and in the future must be one in which trust is an important element and I want to encourage you to go through all the PPP/C manifestos and you will see that in all the manifestos, we tried and were successful in the implementation of 80 to 85 per cent of the promises in those manifestos,” he stated.
The PPP/C Presidential Candidate went on to promise that should the Party be elected into office, it would ensure that there were frequent Cabinet outreaches so that the Administration would get a feel of the reality on the ground and would be better informed as to how its policies affect the population.
“This would be something that you would see in a new PPP/C Government – constant Cabinet outreaches all across this country because in creating this hope, we must be accountable in all the promises we made and that is why we must be very, very careful in what we are promising [in our manifesto].
We will not promise anything that we cannot deliver to the people of Guyana and that is something you can trust us on,” he stressed.
