Human development is the foundation of A Partnership for National Unity’s policy for governance. The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2014 explains that:
Human development involves removing the barriers that hold people back in their freedom to act. It is about enabling the disadvantaged and excluded to realise their rights, to express their concerns openly, to be heard and to become active agents in shaping their destiny. It is about having the freedom to live a life that one values and to manage one’s affairs adequately.
Good governance is the key to human development. APNU commits to the provision of social services (including education, sanitation, health care and water supply), the strengthening of social protection (including pensions, unemployment insurance and labour market regulation) and the generation of social cohesion (including the elimination of discrimination, historic exclusions and inequalities).
APNU’s politics, quite clearly, is different from the PPP/C’s. APNU will pursue the politics of consensus – working together for a common cause. Our people are tired of the ‘know-all’ politician who doesn’t realise that he doesn’t know everything about the economy, everything about the environment, everything about education. Our people have had enough of commitments for consultation at the height of a crisis which are abandoned as soon as the crisis passes; assurances to correct abuses which are cynically disavowed as soon as they are uttered and agreements to implement reforms which are abrogated as soon as they are signed.
APNU has, at the core of its commitment to Guyana, a ‘new covenant’ between the citizen and the government. We believe passionately that all Guyanese are entitled to the benefits of a ‘good life’ in the nation of their birth. The foundation for such a life rests on a sound education, human safety and good governance, among other things.
APNU will place its greatest emphasis on repairing the country’s damaged public education system. Guyana will become once again the education nation it used to be. We shall not tolerate a school system with ramshackle buildings without running water and without functional lavatories. We shall not tolerate schools without properly-equipped laboratories and libraries. We shall not tolerate a school system with 1,000 unqualified and untrained teachers and in which 10, 000 children cannot pass English language at the National Grade Six Assessment Examination.
If the People’s Progressive Party/Civic government cannot understand the importance of education it is time for Guyana to get a government that does. It is time for the PPP to stop holding this nation back and make way for an APNU-led government of national unity.
APNU’s approach to human development is rooted in the belief that each citizen performs best in a strong and safe community of people who share common values. Our approach is to encourage children to take pride in their home, their school, their village, their neighbourhood, their region and their nation. Our approach is about teaching society to respect and protect the most vulnerable – the elderly, women and children, especially girl children. Our task is to apply those values to erase the contrived dividing lines between ethnic groups and between hinterland and coastland. Our objective is to break down the barriers of social bigotry.
APNU is committed to ensuring human safety and improving public security. Guyana’s high rate of serious crime – armed robbery, arson, banditry, murder and piracy – is the result of nearly 23 years of neglect. The PPP rejected the UK-financed Security Sector Reform Action Plan; ignored its own National Drug Strategy Master Plan and sidelined the Report of the Disciplined Forces Commission.
APNU will implement the long-outstanding plans to reform the security sector. It will bring a new approach that not only suppresses crime but also uproots the causes of crime. This approach will make Guyana a safer place for our women and children.
APNU is committed to the ideal of a “good life” for all Guyanese. Voters at the next elections will have had this PPP administration for nearly 23 continuous years. They have seen how the PPP has become a museum of obsolete centralism and discredited cronyism. They have seen how the PPP has become petrified – a mere monument. They have seen how the communism of its founders putrefied into the cronyism of their successors.
A party that does not change, dies. The PPP is dying ideologically, intellectually and institutionally. It has no ideas about how to change the nation. It has no interest in how to change the nation. It has no intention to change its old ‘winner-takes-all’ approach to political power. The PPP boasts not of change but of continuity. Continuity of what? Of corruption? Of crime? Of cronyism?
APNU is a living movement, not a historical monument. Our Partnership represents change – to a “good life”, a bright future. Our country cannot continue teetering interminably on the brink of catastrophe, staggering from crisis to crisis, sliding into the swamp of social decadence.
There are two kinds of people in Guyanese politics today – those in the PPP who control the state television, the state radio and the state newspaper and brazenly prattle about ‘democracy’ and, on the other hand, those who support A Partnership for National Unity – an actual five-party coalition – that practices “inclusionary democracy.”
The time has come in 2015 for the nation to embrace “inclusionary democracy” – ordained by our national Constitution – to move across the regions, across political boundaries, across ethnic barriers, across the generation gap.
APNU represents the national interest. APNU is on the side of the majority. APNU is the mainstream voice in politics today. APNU is the future. APNU invites everyone to work together in our common cause to ensure that our children enjoy a great future. APNU’s commitment is to give all Guyanese a “good life.”
