Cabinet is concerned about meeting this year’s timetable for the holding of local government elections, given the pace of registration and the issue may be taken to Parliament, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, said on Wednesday.
At his post-cabinet media briefing at the Office of the President, Luncheon said that cabinet’s concerns are two-fold and are based on the administration’s declared intention to support the holding of local government elections this year. He said the pace of the house-to-house registration with its implications for costs and the confusion about the use of identity papers, its impact on local government polls and again the costs, were the concerns raised.
He asserted that extra-Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) consensus on the way forward would be required and this might need to be done at the level of Parliament.
He said a number of Guyanese had refused to participate in the registration process.
The ruling People’s Progressive Party had on Tuesday said that it was dissatisfied with the pace of several parts of the house-to-house registration and had contended that at this rate GECOM will not be ready to hold local government elections this year or even next year.
The party had called on the commission to take the necessary measures to improve its work so that there could be local government polls this year. At a press briefing, PPP General Secretary Donald Ramotar told reporters that while the party was pleased that at the moment the commission had registered over half of those eligible, it was dissatisfied with several other aspects of the process. In its most recent statement, GECOM had said that the PPP and the PNCR were satisfied with the pace of the registration.
Ramotar had explained that the party only came to its position recently following its meeting with the commission last month up to which time it had not received important information as it related to transactions. After digesting the information, Ramotar said, given the time the commission was taking to edit and encode the information from the field “it is clear that [the designated] time frame [of six months] cannot be met.”
