The Alliance for Change (AFC) would not be using state resources to campaign for the next elections, according to party officials, who also said that it already screens its donors.
“We have safeguards…it is not the practice of the AFC or the APNU in elections past to have ever used state resources to carry on campaigns,” General Secretary of the AFC Marlon Williams told a press conference on Wednesday.
“There is a system of accountability. We check every donor, every cent and the background from which it is coming from. And if it is not up to par, we do not accept it,” AFC youth and women activist Cynthia Rutherford added.
No Member of Parliament was present at the press conference and in fielding most of the questions Williams and Rutherford explained that they were not ministers and may not be privy to other information.
Although government has opted to mount a legal challenge to the December 21st passage of a no-confidence motion that requires the holding of general elections within three months, through the Department of Public Information (DPI) it has launched a “Confidence in Guyana” public relations campaign to highlight its work since it assumed office.
Additionally, ministers have since last month embarked upon numerous “fan out” exercises across the country to “fully brief citizens” on what is happening in Guyana. Similar outreaches conducted ahead of last November’s local government elections were criticised by the opposition as an indication of the abuse of state resources.
The AFC has previously championed campaign finance reform and had promised that when it got into office it would push for it.
But almost four years have passed without it delivering on its pledge, prompting criticism. Local anti-corruption watchdog body Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc (TIGI) last year sounded a call for the urgent reformulation of campaign financing legislation, which it said would not only curb corruption but ensure that democracy reigns.
Last May, Chairman of the AFC Khemraj Ramjattan had announced that campaign financing legislation is actively being pursued and is a high priority for the AFC. “We are actively pursuing that. It is a piece of legislation that I am very much interested in,” he had said, while noting that he had asked then visiting Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) Secretary General Akbar Khan for help.
“We are going to tap into those resources to ensure that we come up with a campaign financing legislation that is modern enough to take care of all the concerns that you mentioned,” he had said then.
Joseph Harmon, the Minister of State and APNU General Secretary, previously told this newspaper that campaign financing is governed by the law and therefore “any changes in the law will require some levels of consultations as we do, not just within the parties but outside of the parties, because it is not the parties [alone] that are affected. There are other persons who may come up to form a party and will be affected by this law itself.”
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo said that he supported campaign financing reform but he understood too that some amount of resources would be used and politicking could not be avoided.
When AFC members were questioned on Wednesday about members sharing out DPI material on the Ministry of Finance’s 2019 budget in Linden recently, they stressed that state resources were not being used and that party felt it was its duty to spread the word about the government’s work.
Rutherford reiterated that the AFC would not indulge in pilfering the state’s funds for its own use and said that the public could judge the party on its record of the past two local government elections.
“In the event of what has been known to be the practice in the past, gathering supporters to take them from one location to another, I have confidence the AFC will not. …. we would not and do not need to go to those lengths,” she added.
