…PNC/AFC democratic breach?
It’s a fact of life that in the elections season, incumbent governments will try to get away with slipping in some campaigning and pass it off as “just doing our (official) job, man”!! When in the Opposition back in 2011 and 2015, the PNC/APNU and AFC really went after the then PPP Government for the practice – ranging from the $10,000 coupons they’d distributed for years to handing out some All-Terrain Vehicles to a couple of Amerindian villages!
But the practices of the PPP look like playing tiddlywinks and pale into insignificance when compared to what’s unfolding across the country with the APNU/AFC coalition. Why, just this weekend, 19 Ministers – almost the entire Cabinet, now dubbed a “plenary”!! – will be flying into the Rupununi, with their entourages! – to visit 28 Amerindian villages!!
And just before this expedition – larger than the one led by the GDF in 1969 to put down the Rupununi Rebellion! – David Patterson, the Public Infrastructure Minister, announced that the Government will be building a 1.5MW solar farm and refurbishing the Hydro Plant at Moca Moca to light up the southern savannahs while launching a consultancy to build a US$4 billion international airport for Lethem!! And that’s not all, since god knows when the long promised asphalted highway between Linden and Lethem will be started, large sections will be rehabilitated immediately!! And that’s just in ONE WEEKEND FOR ONE REGION!!
But not to worry…according to the Cabinet…oops! “Plenary” spokesperson Harmon, this massive Rupununi outreach wasn’t Govt campaigning!! It was “interactions” with the villagers that just coincidentally were occurring while Granger decides when he’ll stop trampling on the Constitution and announce elections for March 19. But what made the blatant abuse of state resources more galling was their contempt for Indigenous Peoples. The PNC-led APNU and AFC obviously feel they will be persuaded to vote for them after their blatant act of “vote buying”!
Their view of Indigenous Peoples is “they don’t know better” and will forget their 4 years of neglect just because of these empty promises flying thicker than the swarms of sand-flies that descend on the Rupununi in the evenings!!!! Adding insult to this injury was the AFC General Secretary Marlon Williams explicitly promising at his press conference earlier in the week that State resources won’t be used for elections campaigning!! “We have safeguards…it is not the practice of the AFC or the APNU in elections past to have ever used State resources to carry on campaigns”!!
Well, we now know what the “promises” of these jokers are worth when in this most critical area – not to abuse state resources – they’re broken in the blink of the eye!!
…PNC/AFC economic brigandage?
The politicians finally wised up to what every Guyanese who receive their regular “frek” from their visiting relatives from “foreign”, knew for months. That Cambio dealers have been greeting them like lost brothers when they show up to exchange their greenbacks and giving them rates such as they’d never heard of before!! $216 to one?? That’s nothing!!
What’s going on? Well, your Eyewitness was told that it all boils down to the old relationship between supply and demand, which is supposed to be guiding all our decisions in the age of neo-liberalism. There just ain’t as much greenbacks circulating as there used to be. But most interestingly, local banks have been offering a much cheaper rate than Cambios. What gives?? According to the Opposition Leader, the Government has issued a circular INSTRUCTING them to do so!!
Which means that once again, the PNC is intervening by dictating to the foreign exchange market to prop up an artificial rate.
Showing once again, they haven’t a clue on running a free enterprise economy!!
…false equivalence?
ANUG Leader Ralph Ramkarran warned that a “constitutional crisis” is nigh upon us – triggered by the PNC/AFC’s refusal to hold constitutionally mandated elections by March 19.
Yet he said the Govt and the Opposition must “compromise”.
What’s the Opposition got to do with it??
