By Joseph Allen
Cement block maker, Jeffon Muhammad who ran for APNU and won in Constituency Six – Cummings Lodge North, Central, and South and Pattensen/Turkeyen South area – said that his focus will shift mostly to youth employment in the community.
In an interview with the Sunday Stabroek, Muhammad, a resident of the area for some 28 years explained that his main focus will be on empowering the youths in a community where unemployment remains high.
“They have a lot of youths that are unemployed. We will see how to get them employed and see how best we could help them; you know, start a youth group programme, put up a youth group programme to assist.”
According to Muhammad, such a need is important since it remains one of the main issues that has arisen over time.
While noting the need for youth to be employed, Muhammad also said that the need for community development will also be an important issue to tackle since a lot needed to be done in the community.
“Well, normally the thing is to just go around and see the needs of the community, we have a lot of drains to be de-silted and even to the [community] centre which is currently deteriorating for us, where the youths were complaining about it, not only the youths, the big people also. So, my thing is to just see how much work could get done within the community, likewise if we could get the drains active and clean that will keep the lands them from flooding and see if we could maintain the roads them that are deteriorating right now and as much as we could help the community.”
According to results from GECOM, Muhammad was named the winning candidate in constituency six by eight votes, ahead of PPP/C candidate Param Persaud. He garnered 1574 votes, while Persaud had 1566.
The finals results came after the PPP/C had requested the recount, given that the constituency had a high amount of rejected ballots.
Persaud lost even though he received more votes than in 2018. In 2018, he had defeated Andrea Marks. Marks who previously held a proportional representation seat has been an outspoken advocate for vendors’ rights and agitated constantly for works to be done in her constituency.
Persaud secured 1,279 of the votes cast while Marks managed 1,066 and AFC candidate Sylvester Shim garnered 148 votes. The result might have been closer if APNU and the AFC had contested as a coalition.
In 2016 the APNU+AFC candidate Lyndon Hillman had managed 2.016 votes compared to 1,366 votes for Tamashwar Budhoo of the PPP/C.
Knowing how tight the race was in a community whose support for the two major parties is almost equally divided, Muhammad said that he gathered support because he was already familiar with doing works in the community. He opined that he had won because the people in the area have maintained that his competitor was never really active in the community.
“According to a lot of people they say that when he (Persaud) won they never really see him after much, and he never really come around visit nobody. According to what I also recall is that people say that they don’t even know him and don’t even know to get on to him to voice their concerns. This would have led me to victory because I’m always on the ground talking to the people”, Muhammad said.
With Muhammad taking up one of the 15 seats in Georgetown, the council will be comprised of 19 members from the Opposition and 11 from the Government.
