Despite the PPP/C’s position that it will not take part in the unity talks with the government, Minister of State Joseph Harmon said yesterday that the door remains open.
When asked at a post cabinet press briefing whether the government will look to examine the conditions set out by the opposition with respect to continuing the unity talks, Harmon said that if the opposition party has concerns they ought to be expressed through the proper channels and not the press.
The PPP had announced at its weekly press conference on November 16, that there will be no engagements. It said this position was arrived at after a meeting of the party’s Central Committee on Saturday, which noted the “continuous witch-hunting, arbitrary dismissals and brazen termination of contracts of longstanding government employees and public servants, labelling party leaders and former government ministers as thieves.”
Harmon told reporters that government continues to be open to the talks. “It is really up to the PPP/C to really come to the table. We bend back as far as we could. If there are conditions which the PPP set out, we would look at them objectively,” he said.
But he stressed that he would not comment on statements made in the media on the issue as he had said before that the opposition, as a responsible political party, can use the various mechanisms available to relay its concerns to the government; either through writing or the opposition leader communicating directly with the president.
“You don’t just get up on a Monday morning and decide that national unity can’t wuk because A, B, C, D and you just release it in the newspaper,” he said, while adding that this would not be a serious approach to addressing the issue.
“You can’t come every week and throw out a new menu of measures and… say look unless you do this, we can’t do that and then next week when you dealing with the first set you come with another set… We have to be serious about these things,” Harmon stressed.
“National unity to us [the government] is not an option. National unity is a requirement, a prerequisite for us to move this country forward and so we do not play around with it. We do not play around with words; we are serious about it. We are serious about our engagement with the opposition on these matters and we are open to conversations with the opposition to see how best we can move this country forward,” he added.
He explained that the APNU+AFC had campaigned on the basis that Guyana “needed national unity. We felt at all stages that a government of national unity is what is needed in Guyana because we did not believe that any party gaining 51 or 52 or 53% can claim that they have 100%,” he said.
Harmon noted that after looking at the country’s entire political landscape, government felt that unless “we are able to engage the energies of all Guyanese that you would never be able to move the country at the pace which is required for us to catch up with the rest of the world. Based on our resources and our geographic space, we are not really where we should be in 2015.”
Harmon noted that Singapore became independent one year before Guyana. He spoke of how Singapore, with less resources, and which was a third world state just like Guyana has managed to transform itself into a first world state through heavy investment in its human capital.
He said that this is what the Guyana government is trying to emulate through the establishment of a public service staff college.
Unity talks between the two parties are in limbo, with both sides speaking to each other through the media. Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo had said that his party needed clarity on government’s national unity invitation as there were two conflicting proposals. He said that initially President David Granger invited the PPP/C to be part of a national unity committee but subsequently Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo spoke of a government of national unity.
