The Alliance for Change (AFC) plans to register its concern with A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) over the “unfair” allocation of seats in Georgetown and other parts of the country following the March 18 Local Government Elections (LGE).
“I have had complaints from my members and I intend to talk to Amna Ally about it. That’s a genuine concern that I have and I will want to address it, but the coalition will have to address that,” Leader of the AFC, Khemraj Ramjattan told Stabroek News yesterday when contacted on the complaints.
The AFC Leader’s comments came in the wake of concerns raised by members that they have been “unfairly treated” in the seat allocation process in municipalities that the coalition won at the LGE. This is particularly so in the capital city where APNU will end up with 22 of the 25 seats available to the governing coalition, sources say.
Ramjattan said that he did not want to expand on the issue until it was settled at the coalition level.
The complaint over the seats would be the first serious challenge for the coalition since the Cummingsburg Accord sealing the pact was hammered out on February 14, 2015. While there has been simmering unease about certain provisions of the Accord not being adhered to, this is the first matter that has triggered broad discontent in the AFC and burst into the open. APNU and the AFC had said that there was a dispute resolution mechanism between the two but nothing has been heard about this since the coalition took office last May.
Earlier concerns that the responsibilities promised to Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, the most senior AFC representative in government, had been diluted, were brushed aside by the party and the coalition.
Pointing to the Georgetown municipality as an example, one AFC official said that of the 25 seats won by the coalition on March 18, the AFC was only given three seats – by virtue of First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) wins and zero of the 11 Proportional Representation (PR) seats. Eleven APNU candidates won FPTP seats. This means that APNU will control 22 of the 30 seats on the council.
The three AFC candidates who won their constituencies are Sherod Duncan of Constituency 14, Carlyle Goring of Constituency 2 and Lionel Jaikarran of Constituency 1.
“In Georgetown it is worse but this is throughout the country, APNU railroad the process,” an incensed AFC official told Stabroek News yesterday.
“The party’s leaders were warned not to enter local government elections without an agreement on how the outcome would be dealt with. The Cummingsburg Accord never covered local government elections, the same way it didn’t cover junior ministers and a whole host of other things…so there should have been an agreement in place,” the official added.
Another official of the party echoed most of what his fellow member stated and said that both groups are to be blamed for not dealing with establishing legally binding agreements before the coalition contested the LGE.
One member believes that the heavily skewed ratio of awarded seats can have a negative impact on the party’s membership.
“The coalition was stuck with overlooking a further framework (beyond the Cummingsburg Accord) and settling matters. They fell short terribly…In Georgetown, all the AFC will get is the 3 constituency seats and no PR seats and this will do serious damage to the morale of the party’s members,” the AFC member stated.
“Everyone is looking at Georgetown but that has happened countrywide and it is frightening … There was no meeting of the AFC and APNU to decide on how the seats will be shared so anything that will be seen in the papers was not the product of an agreement. There has been no agreement reached. This can be very injurious to the party and can remind people why coalitions don’t last,” the member added. Another official explained that the two parties had an oral agreement on how they would contest the LGE.
“The agreement was, we were supposed to sit down and vet all candidates and the best ones go through, regardless of which parties they are from and regardless of the numbers. None of that actually happened, APNU literally railroaded the process and put who they wanted. If they had gone through that process, for example (Winston) Harding would have never happened. A final list has been compiled and look, no one from AFC is in the PR,” the AFC official asserted.
Harding was the APNU+AFC candidate who got caught up in child abuse allegations leading to the coalition withdrawing support for him. He nonetheless won his constituency as he remained on the ballot as a coalition candidate.
Representative of the coalition’s list, APNU’s Oscar Clarke told Stabroek News yesterday that he does not know who is on the list submitted on Tuesday, and whether his group has more seats.
“I know nothing about any list … I have nothing to do with compilation of the list…are there only three persons from the AFC? I don’t know. I still don’t know who has been chosen, who from the AFC and who from APNU,” said Clarke, who is also general secretary of the PNCR, the main component of APNU.
AFC members said that they have learnt that the rationale used to allocate a paltry number of seats to them was that the municipalities are strongholds of the PNCR and they would have won them with or without the AFC.
“There is a feeling among APNU members that Georgetown, Linden, New Amsterdam and to a large extent Bartica have always been the strong base of the PNCR so probably it is felt that ‘We could have won them anyway’ but that doesn’t make for the spirt of team work”, the AFC official said.
Further, the official added “This has attracted a lot of scrimmage from people who have been set aside and there might even be a protest. Anything that goes over there (to GECOM) doesn’t have the blessing of the AFC”.
One AFC official said that they want the message to be heard that “The palm and the key won so no one has the right to the throne or to say they have done all the hard work or all the work.”