President Donald Ramotar on Sunday told his supporters in Brooklyn, New York, that general and local government elections cannot be held simultaneously and once again issued a call for Opposition Leader David Granger to be clear on which of the polls he wants.
Speaking at a town hall-style meeting, organised by the Association of Concerned Guyanese, the president accused Granger of speaking from both sides of his mouth by supporting the no-confidence motion filed by AFC and also for local government elections. If the AFC’s motion is passed in the National Assembly, then the government would be forced to resign and new general and regional elections would have to be held.
“Well, my mother used to say you can’t have in cake and have it in bake; you can’t have it both ways, you have to make up your mind what you want. Local government and national elections cannot be held together, that’s the reality. So, I wrote Mr Granger and I haven’t got a reply from him as yet,” Ramotar said in a recording from the meeting heard by this newspaper.
Granger had written to the president and demanded that he set a date for the polls within a week’s time, prompting Ramotar to seek a clarification in the light of APNU’s public endorsement of the AFC’s motion, which it intends to support. The deadline has since passed and Granger, who maintains that his position is clear, has since announced plans for public protests to press for his demands.
Ramotar said he wanted clarity on what Granger wanted since his ambiguity adds more uncertainty to the political landscape of the country.
The president is currently in New York to lead Guyana’s delegation at the United Nation’s inaugural World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, which began yesterday.
During the meeting on Sunday, Ramotar sought to account for the delay in the holding of the local government elections, for which there has been a renewed push this year. He said then president Bharrat Jagdeo and then leader of the PNCR Robert Corbin had reached an agreement in 2010 that would have paved the way for the polls. However, he added, Corbin in that same year requested that the elections not be held before the 2011 elections and that it should be held after.
But when “the arithmetic in the parliament changed and the opposition got the one seat majority,” Ramotar said, the PNCR reneged on the agreement and is now seeking to make the Ministry of Local Government a “toothless poodle” by transferring all the power of the ministry “into a Local Government Commission. That is totally unacceptable at this point and time…,” he declared.
Granger has requested that the president issue the commencement order to operationalise the Local Government Commission after a year-long delay since the enabling legislation was enacted and that he also initiate a process by which the vetoed Local Government (Amendment) Bill, intended to strip ministerial control over local authorities, could be returned for assent.
Ramotar acknowledged that in the run up to the 2011 elections he did say that once the PPP/C was returned to office, local government elections would be held within the first year but he added that at the time he did not know the dynamics in Parliament would have changed.
“…But I did not anticipate that we would have had a one seat minority in Parliament and that created political uncertainty… within what we call the politics of the country,” he said.
Local government elections, due to be held every three years, were last held in 1994.
During an address to the nation last Thursday, Granger said the Guyanese people face “a grave threat to their constitutional liberties and privileges” and appealed for their support by declaring that the time has come for all good people “to demand their inalienable right to elect the persons they want to represent them in their towns, villages and neighbourhoods.”
Meanwhile, Ramotar also told the gathering that the opposition is “really taking up anti-developmental positions” and he referred to the 2012 budget cuts, which he said the court ruled that were unconstitutional but in 2013 they did the same thing.
“Well, we didn’t have to go back to the court. We restored the budget and they participated in the process and voted in it as well and in 2014 they cut the budget again and we are in the process of restoring the budget again at this time,” he stated.
He said the fact that the opposition participated in the process in 2013 meant they viewed it as legal and as such dismissed their claims that it was illegal for the cuts to be restored in 2014.
The court ruling was only finalised earlier this year and is being appealed. The government’s decision to proceed with expenditure that was rejected by the National Assembly during the consideration of the budget estimates this year and then seek approval for the spending through a Financial Paper was the catalyst for the AFC’s no-confidence motion.
