The Executive Committee of the People’s Progressive Party met again yesterday as it moves closer to selecting its Presidential Candidate for upcoming national elections.
The process is closed to being completed, this newspaper was told. The top brass of the party has held several meetings to consider the nominees in the contest to lead the PPP in the upcoming national elections. The nominees include General Secretary Donald Ramotar, Speaker of the National Assembly Ralph Ramkarran, presidential advisor Gail Teixeira and Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee. Party veteran Moses Nagamootoo, who has declared his interest in being the candidate, has said he will not submit himself to the process being utilised by the party. Reports have also surfaced recently of a likely nomination for Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud.
The party’s 15-member Executive Committee, after debate on nominations, will make a recommendation, based either on consensus or a vote, for referral to the Central Committee. Deliberation at the level of the Central Committee could see the nomination of alternatives. However, on previous occasions the recommendation of the Executive Committee has been adopted.
Ramotar is seen as one of the front-runners and the candidate supported by President Bharrat Jagdeo, who is constitutionally barred from contesting for the presidency again.
Meantime, the PPP has lashed out at PNCR Presidential Candidate David Granger, saying that he was a bad role model to the young generation as “he was part and parcel of the PNC scheme to destroy the institutional integrity of our state.”
In a press statement on Thursday, the PPP said that it had noted the attempt by the PNCR to distance Granger from what it termed his role as “one of the chief enforcers of its party paramountcy ideology during his rule of the army in the 1970s.”
The governing party charged that the PNCR is “trying to present Granger as a Sunday ‘school boy’ knowing fully-well that by his own admittance of holding a 40-year membership in the PNC, he loyally carried out the biddings of the PNC Administration.” According to the PPP, Granger’s entire career in the army was filled with professional misconduct as an accomplice to numerous oppressive and retrogressive policies during the dictatorial rule of the PNC. “The PPP is convinced that no amount of window-dressing could cloud the reality of Granger’s tainted character as the undertaker of the PNC’s biddings as still recorded as Guyana’s most brutal dictatorial regime which survived on the rigging of elections, intimidation and the muzzling of the press,” the party said. “Granger is a bad (role) model to our young generation as he was part and parcel of the PNC scheme to destroy the institutional integrity of our state. He should stop hiding behind [party leader Robert] Corbin and answer for his contribution to the atrocities of the PNC regime,” the PPP said.
