The People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) executive has been reviewing the performance of the one-year-old APMU+AFC coalition government and admits that while all is not going as expected recommendations have been made to remedy that.
“The government is a coalition government so we have to talk about that …we looked at the high points and the low points and how things are going and made recommendations,” General Secretary of the party Oscar Clarke told Stabroek News yesterday.
“Some things are going well some things are not going too well …everything is not going as well as we would like,” he further added.
Clarke’s comments came on the heels of a PNCR executives retreat held last week and mere weeks before its Congress is held next month. The PNCR is the key component of APNU – the major partner in the APNU+AFC coalition government.
The Alliance for Change (AFC) had in April of this year held a similar retreat which had also discussed the coalition’s period of togetherness and performance and to discuss a number of issues of concern to the party.
It was then that the party had voiced public concerns on the concentration of various powers in Minister of State Joseph Harmon, the handling of the Rodney CoI report and the raft of audits that have been done of state entities.
When the AFC held its statutory National Executive Committee meeting recently, which also included members of the party in central government and those representatives at the local government level, the coalition was also discussed.
Then, the point was made by executives to municipal representatives to ensure the party’s identity was maintained and not absorbed in the coalition and that they should speak out on areas of concern in their respective local government areas.
The PNCR General Secretary explained that he could not give specific areas of concern discussed at the meeting but said it was generally to review all that is happening in the country from a PNCR perspective.
“They were able to discuss in detail, some of the situations that have arisen in the country and so on, we discussed that. So we achieved our objective of discussing that and coming to certain conclusions and making certain recommendations,” Clarke asserted.
“Generally we know how things are going in the country, generally we discussed from a party political point of view. This was a party meeting and the party was discussing things as the party sees it. So we were looking at various situations in the country as the party sees it. The recommendations we made therefore are party recommendations which we will be putting forward to certain party agencies to government agencies and so on. ..We made some recommendations which we will put forward,” he added.
