A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) executive member Basil Williams yesterday accused the Private Sector Commission (PSC) of lacking the courage to tell the president and the ruling party that they have acted wrongly in prorogating parliament and then delaying the holding of national elections.
Williams told a news conference yesterday that the PSC is suddenly talking about all sides coming together but has never come out to say, “PPP ya wrong. Mr. President you are wrong. They don’t do that.”
Williams was responding to recent comments made by former chairman of the PSC Ramesh Dookhoo that the private sector ‘hates’ elections and expressed disappointment that the members of the opposition and government cannot work together to find consensus.
According to Williams, the organisation is motivated by own business interests. “They want elections to come and be over with so that they can get back to normal. To the business of making money,” he said adding that APNU has engaged the private sector on a number of occasions and has pointed out the government’s clear breaches of the constitution. “We haven’t seen anything of a strong nature coming from the private sector… to say government look you wrong and you should talk to opposition and try and resolve this matter,” he added.
Asked if the party was at all surprised by the comments made Dookhoo, Williams said that the private sector has never had the courage to show dissent against the views and actions of the government.
Meanwhile, APNU MP James Bond said that as he understood it, the statement was made by Dookhoo, who is a number of the private sector and not by the PSC itself. He said he knew for a fact that the commission had called for the holding of local government elections as well as other comments about the holding of elections.
“So if Mr Dookhoo is of the opinion that he does not want an elections, I think that is Mr Dookhoo’s view. But I think certain members of the Private Sector Commission are very, very guarded of our democracy and would like to see elections, both local and national.
That’s from the Private Sector Commission itself,” Bond stated.
Told that Dookhoo was speaking at a PSC event and that the commission did not take any steps to distance itself from those comments, Bond maintained that those comments cannot be attributed to the chairman of the commission. “I wouldn’t take Mr Dookhoo’s word and hold it against anybody but Mr Dookhoo,” he said.
