Dear Editor,
For five successive days it was publicly announced that the President (I repeat, the President) would be holding a rally in Lethem six days before the recent municipal election. It therefore came as a shock to impartial observers to discover that it was in fact a partisan, political meeting, more precisely an APNU+AFC rally to promote their candidates.
How could the President, whose office represents all the people of Guyana, so flagrantly use and abuse that office in order to promote the narrow political interests of his party?
But if that is unacceptable, the next question to be asked is who paid for all the related travel, accommodation and transportation expenses. This is another abuse of state resources by a president whose party had rightly decried similar pre-elections “Cabinet Outreach” practices by the previous government.
In addition to this we have the Minister of Communities saying that the recent elections “represent victory for the people of Guyana and not for any political party.” How disingenuous of the Minister, when both political parties campaigned so blatantly on their own behalf, not on behalf of the people. And please don’t tell me that either party or government represents the people ‒ not when the President (who should represent all the people) said a few months ago that he would apologize to the people but not to the PPP. Does he not realize that the PPP represents almost half of the people of Guyana?
And wasn’t it the same Minister of Communities who said some time ago that his party would not contest the local government elections, but instead would encourage individuals to participate? This is yet another example of duplicity and double-speak by APNU+AFC. First were the broken election promises, then came the attempt to install ethnic- and gender-lopsided boards, followed by the unbelievable 50% increase in ministerial salaries. The public servants will experience the next deception when the “significant salary increases” promised in their manifesto turns out to be just that ‒ a promise.
I recently spoke to many people both in Georgetown and in Lethem and their message to the politicians is clear: Keep out of local elections. And almost all of them referred to APNU+AFC’s promise of “Time for a Change.” After one year, nothing, they say, has changed.
Yours faithfully,
Clairmont Lye
