Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran has berated the Alliance For Change (AFC) for failing to hold its coalition partner APNU to account and for becoming a “rubber stamp”.
In his accountability column in today’s Stabroek News, Goolsarran discussed traditional voting patterns and third party politics but lamented that AFC had been sidelined by A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) and had not asserted itself.
“There were signs that this pattern of voting was changing when the Alliance For Change (AFC) came on board, especially for the 2011 and 2015 elections.
However, since it entered into a coalition with the APNU, the AFC failed miserably to deliver on its promises to hold its senior coalition partner to account and to provide the much-needed checks and balances against a party with a very checkered history of governance, transparency and accountability, especially during the period 1968 to 1985. As a result, the AFC has lost most of its political support, as evidenced by its extremely poor showing in last year’s local government elections.
“Notwithstanding the pretense otherwise, in reality there is currently no APNU+AFC coalition.
The AFC has allowed its senior partner to outsmart it on all fronts, despite having superior bargaining power within the Coalition. Its leaders, Ministers and parliamentarians have become so enamoured with their new-found positions of power and authority and the related benefits they derive from such positions, that they sacrificed the public interest and the public good to satisfy their personal ambitions and interests.
The AFC has become the rubber stamp for the actions of its senior partner and has been consumed by and subsumed into APNU”, Goolsarran declared.
Several AFC decisions while in government have been soundly criticised over the period since 2015. These include its support for the unilateral naming of the Chairman of the Guyana Elections Com-mission, its recent backing of PNCR Chairman Volda Lawrence over remarks she made at a party meeting and the decision to support the government claim that a majority for the purposes of a motion of no confidence in Parliament was 34.
