Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo has denied a statement in a USAID report that the APNU+AFC coalition government had proposed a unity government that was rejected by the People’s Progressive Party (PPP).
At a press conference at Freedom House on Wednesday, Jagdeo said that there had been no “formal proposal about power sharing or anything of that sort.”
According to the March, 2016 report, ‘Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Assessment of Guyana’, the multi-ethnic APNU+AFC coalition signalled a change from the past exclusionary politics. It reached out to the PPP/C to create a government of national unity, but the PPP/C refused. Some thought the coalition had not tried hard enough to convince the PPP/C to join, but the PPP/C told the assessment team that the APNU+AFC had “won the election so let them run the government,” the report said.
Jagdeo noted that the report had also issued a disclaimer that the views were not those of the US government or USAID.
He added that he suspects that it was because “the US government would know that that is not true. And it depends on who the consultants meet when they come.”
According to him, Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo had mentioned about the “olive branch” [a symbol of peace] that he claimed he had extended to the PPP.
“…He doesn’t even have a dry branch to offer, much-less an olive branch; he has no power. You know he offered (an) olive branch to the PPP [but] it’s purely nonsensical,” Jagdeo told the media.
However, in terms of joining the coalition, he knows that they [opposition] “have to work for the development of Guyana. I do believe that people have to work together for the interest of the country.”
Further, he said: “And APNU does have a constituency like the PPP and we have to find ways of working together but it has to be on the basis of clear principles. And we are not a party that some people thought that we were going to beg to be part of this government.”
Jagdeo said too that his party has “put some issues out and made it clear to the president from the beginning that when they [government] are done with campaigning” then his party would be prepared to engage.
He accused the government of still being in the “campaign mode. They are still in the mode of destroying reputations and when they are finished then we would start talking issues that are very, very important for our country.”
