The Alliance for Change (AFC) and Working Peoples Alliance (WPA) say that they are satisfied with the APNU+AFC alliance Lists of Candidates for the May 11 general elections.
“The coalition is made up of six parties. The list as far as we have been able to, should be (representative) of all the parties and we are satisfied that it is representative of all the parties. I don’t want to be discussing individual party criteria,” said Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, the leader of the WPA yesterday. The WPA is a member of the APNU coalition.
Roopnarine and AFC General-Secretary David Patterson, at a press conference yesterday, said that their respective parties submitted names for the list and were not required to justify to the other parties in the coalition the criteria used to select persons. In the same vein, they said, they respect the selection decision of the other parties.
“The way we in the WPA select its candidates and in the AFC, whatever rules the PNC may have, internal rules to deal with their candidates, we have not engaged in the internal business of the partners in the coalition,” Roopnaraine stressed.
No member of the PNCR was on the panel at the press conference and attempts to contact Leader David Granger for comment proved futile.
Roopnaraine’s comments came in response to a question by Stabroek News on the criteria used to select its candidates.
When the alliance presented its list on Nomination Day on Tuesday, notably missing was former APNU Parliamentarian Vanessa Kissoon. Kissoon is a popular member within APNU’s Region 10 stronghold but has had skirmishes with the leadership of the PNCR—the main constituent of APNU—in recent times. Granger, on Tuesday, said the Region 10 teacher was not on the list because she did not meet the criteria. “We have a balanced list, she served two terms,” Granger said.
Asked by Stabroek News if the new criteria of two terms would now be applied to everyone, he said, “We have a list of criteria and those criteria were applied because of the work ahead of us.” However, when pressed on whether Kissoon was told that she would not be on the list, Granger would only say, “We selected persons based on that list of criteria.”
Patterson said that the AFC did not use a two term criterion to select its candidates but a series of holistic requirements. “That is not one of the positions of the Alliance For Change. We have term limits on our executives but not on parliamentarians or anyone else,” he noted.
He explained how their candidates were selected, saying that “the first (criteria) is membership. From each individual region, they would have caucused internally and shortlisted a set of eligible individuals, the AFC, we had a quota because the accord provides for a 60:40 split, so we would have gone through with the executives and the regions and selected,” he said.
Roopnarine said the coalition’s list was one of balance and competent persons. “We wanted to, all times, have a balance of gender, youth…wanted to reflect a broad list of candidates… we wanted to place a great deal of emphasis on competence because part of what we are suffering from is incompetence in many areas in state areas and we wanted to ensure we lift the level,” he said.
