The AFC yesterday called on government to go back to the drawing board on its plan to increase the electricity rates for Linden and party Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan warned that it could fuel national unrest.
“There should not be an increase in tariffs in Linden. …There must be a better way for that community that is suffering for such a long time,” Ramjattan said at a party news conference at the Side Walk Café on Middle Street. “If there is an increase it could create a crisis in Linden, it could create demonstrations in Linden, he added.
In keeping with an announcement during the budget, Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon said last week that the revised electricity tariffs will kick in from July 1, as part of government’s gradual scale-back of its subsidising the cost of power in the mining town.
Ramjattan said yesterday that cottage industries that need electricity could be crippled by the increase, plunging an area with a weak economy further into depression and angering the citizenry.
He accused the governing party PPP/C of seeking to use the hike in electricity rates to incite unrest and he suggested it is a strategy intended to galvanise its largely Indo-Guyanese support base.
“The government wants to take us to the edge… because whenever we are taken to the edge, the PPP gets what is called a ‘turn in their favour’ because of the racial voting patterns. When you take Guyana to the edge, as we have seen over the years, forces that support them largely, ethnic forces, go back to home”, he said.
‘Wake up’
Ramjattan also cautioned President Donald Ramotar against ignoring the decisions of the opposition majority in the National Assembly, where APNU and AFC combined have one-seat over the PPP/C.
Ramotar recently said he will not sign opposition bills into law unless the government had some input into them. Ramotar was quoted as saying by the Government Information Agency (GINA), “They [the opposition] must respect what is their role… I am making it very clear that I will not assent to any bill that they carry unless it is with the full agreement of the executive and the full involvement of the executive.”
But Ramjattan, reading from a statement, said the President needed to “wake up” and remember that he has moved beyond being the leader of the PPP/C. “He is now the leader of a free, democratic country and in this democracy it is the collective will of the people as represented in the National Assembly that will pass the laws,” he said, adding that Ramotar has an opportunity to demonstrate to all that he is democratic and wants what is best, not only for his party but for Guyana by listening to both sides of the House. “The dispensation of the Tenth Parliament presents the opportunity to President Ramotar to show to the world that under his stewardship, democracy will take firm root in a country that has had its own type of dictatorship and that he can move this country beyond a fast developing oligarchy,” Ramjattan said.
