Introduction: Stabroek News has invited the People’s Progressive Party/Civic, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) and the Alliance For Change to submit a weekly column on governance and related matters. Only APNU has submitted a column this week.
The People’s Progressive Party’s twenty-two-year, one-party regime has wrought a terrible social and political crisis in this country. Arson, armed robberies, banditry, domestic violence, murder, piracy and fatal aviation, riverine and road accidents have scarred our society, scared away investors and scuttled economic development. Poverty and unemployment have created a horde of beggars. Teachers, nurses, university graduates and many ordinary citizens flee the country to safer destinations.
President Donald Ramotar did not represent change when he was inaugurated three years ago on 3rd December 2011. He merely promised to continue the flawed economic policies and projects of his predecessor, Bharrat Jagdeo. He did not represent change when he promised to continue Jagdeo’s security policy that has given us a murder rate that is three times that of the USA and placed us among states with the highest suicide and fatal road accident per capita in the world.
Whatever Donald Ramotar represented as President during his troubled triennium, he did not represent change. He really represents Bharrat Jagdeo. He has already identified himself with the go-it-alone, winner-takes-all politics of the past. That’s the PPP doctrine in which he was schooled.
He is hanging on to the politics of the past. He does not represent what the country needs as we prepare for elections to choose a new government that will lead our children forward into the future beyond 2015. The PPP thinks that we have forgotten everything that’s happened in the last 22 years under both presidents – Jagdeo and Ramotar. It’s now time to think again.
Everyone understands that we must change from the ‘winner-takes-all’ contest that has characterised every election for the last 60 years. PPP politicians employ the same old race-baiting, scare-mongering tactics that they have used in every election to appeal to our fears and our prejudices and with the false stories spread by the PPP-controlled state media.
Everyone understands that, in order to change Guyana, we need to cooperate with one another to solve this country’s problems. More people have come to understand that APNU and its approach of ‘inclusionary democracy’ can change our country:
- We can fix our public education system by investing in better-equipped and fully-staffed primary and secondary schools, our college of education and our national university.
- We can train our young workers for new jobs and propel Guyanese to be among the most productive workforces in the Caribbean.
- We can provide civilised infrastructure to the residents of our mushrooming squatter settlements.
- We can pay our public servants, policemen, soldiers and teachers more to enable them to work for long and satisfying careers and to retire with dignity with a decent pension.
- We will ensure that our citizens enjoy their right to practice local democracy and to manage the communities in which they live.
Everyone understands that the forthcoming general and regional elections will be a defining moment in our history. Everyone understands what the stakes are. Everyone understands that the PPP is incapable of solving all of our problems and they don’t expect it to. Everyone understands that the PPP is the hindrance to national unity. It doesn’t matter what our beliefs are – whether we go to church, or the mandir or the masjid, or not. We may come from different places but we share common hopes and one common destiny.
APNU understands the people’s aspirations that is why it is the partnership of the future. People need change and this is the time to change Guyana. This is the time to change:
- Labour relations – to show that we can bring unions, corporations, political parties and civic organisations together to work out a new ‘social contract.’
- Police behaviour – to show that we are no longer a country that tortures its own villagers or that throws our young people in the police lockups without ever telling them why they are there or what offence they are charged with.
- The taxation system – to lower value-added tax and raise the income tax threshold and put more cash in the pockets of working people.
- The education system – to change the obsolete retirement practices and emolument packages that are chasing our teachers and lecturers and to encourage science education in our schools.
- The local government system – to respect constitutional articles providing for decentralization and devolution of power and allow local government organs to function with the autonomy guaranteed them under the constitution.
Guyanese have woken up all over this great country – from Aishalton in the South to Aruka in the North and Siparuta in the East. Young people are eager to vote in the forthcoming 2015 general and regional elections. They know that we are facing challenges that we haven’t seen in a generation. People realise that, if we don’t meet those challenges, we could end up bequeathing our children a country that is even poorer than it is now.
Guyanese are yearning for the “inclusionary democracy” which the Constitution promised. Guyanese are yearning to realise the ideal of one people with one destiny which our national motto promised. Guyanese are yearning for an opportunity to come together; to reach out to one another; to accept that our survival as a nation is more important than the pursuit of any partisan political agenda.
Donald Ramotar, if he spent some time engaging poor rural and hinterland villages that have been hardest hit by the PPP’s political policies, would understand the kind of change for which Guyanese are yearning.
