The Alliance for Change (AFC) yesterday kick-started its elections campaign in Linden, Region 10 urging all political leaders to put country and people first and agree to collectively craft a joint 15-year development plan for Guyana. In that way, for at least three consecutive presidential terms, there will be a continuum of planned projects and initiatives not cancelled or terminated because of political differences.
“Since if would be necessary to attract foreign investment to Guyana to go forward, we should identify those areas that are critical to our development and come to a political consensus between all the parties and leading civil society groups on a 10 to 15 years development plan,” AFC presidential candidate Nigel Hughes yesterday told a meeting in the parking lot of Linden Municipal Market.
“The reason for that is, we know that every time we change government here, we change everything and it takes two to three years for the people that you had moved and to be put back in … and the disruption does such damage to the economy, “ he added.
The party will also unveil its oil and gas development plans, in increments, beginning next week, which can form part of its contribution to the proposed 15-year plan.
Hughes said that political parties can come together with their respective advisors and teams and brainstorm ways for the effective use of revenues to be earned from this country’s oil resources, which he estimated will come from around 18 billion barrels of oil reserves .
Key in those talks and plans he reasoned, should be the educational development of citizens. “Unless we make our people educated, they won’t have a chance to participate in this modern economy that is coming. So let’s have a 10 to 15-year plan that whoever goes into government, all of us have signed off on it,” he stressed.
A part of the plan should also focus on foreign affairs, given that Guyana will continue to have to deal with Venezuela’s spurious claims to her territory, even if the case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is won. “… Venezuela has already indicated that it wouldn’t recognise it. So we will already remain under threat. It is why all of us in the political sphere need a plan in that area,” Hughes said.
Other areas in the plan must also focus on a time frame.for removal of poverty in Guyana, as Highes lamented that while this country sees $40 million generated every day from production, many people still live in poverty.
Poverty highlights, he said, are most prominent in hinterland and rural communities, areas that the PPP government hardly visits.
He pointed to the AFC’s recent visit to Phillipai in Region Seven and made public the heart-breaking conditions the people there endure. Noted was that students from age five had to use pit latrines .
More of those visits, he said, are planned throughout the country and similar levels of poverty will be seen.
To garner in-depth information regarding issues facing citizens across the country, the party last week said that it has embarked on a “listening and grounding campaign”.
In a release issued on Wednesday last, the AFC said that these informal listening sessions will take place everywhere – in the markets, corner shops, community grounds, citizens’ bridges, yards, and in the hinterland and riverine communities, “even through deplorable roads, dilapidated bridges, overgrown bushes, floods and impassable mountainous terrain to engage citizens in issues that affect them.”
Hughes, it stated, has made it clear that this outreach has no interest in reaching the electorate from one particular ethnic group but instead, is cross-sectional. “The AFC is a political party competing nationally in every square inch of this country, in every village, in every city, in every municipality. We don’t approach it on the basis of splitting votes because we do not recognise that people belong ethnically to anybody. … We are going to meet everybody as far south as Gunns, as far east as Corriverton and Moleson Creek, as far west as Baramita or Barima to understand what our citizens are experiencing at every socio-economic level,” Hughes was quoted as saying.
As such, the outreach will seek to include the vulnerable, marginalised and those not afforded the equality of opportunity in every sector in the fastest growing economy in the world, which just happens to be their homeland
According to the release, the AFC will restate in every forum that 48 per cent of Guyanese live in poverty as stated by the World Bank Report (2022). Added to this, a UNICEF, WHO & World Bank 2023, Levels and Trends in Child Malnutrition Report, “alarmingly” revealed that Guyana leads in Wasting – a child malnutrition condition – topping the chart in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The release said the AFC also seeks to remind that all Guyanese must be cognizant of the fact that the government is only the custodian of oil revenues. However, while the money belongs to the citizens, the data reveals a starkly different socio-economic phenomenon which indicates that half of Guyana’s population is in “absolute or transient” poverty.
The release noted that while the World Bank and UNICEF use the positivist (quantitative) method of data collection in their survey, the AFC will be employing the interpretivist (qualitative) method which relies on information generated by citizens to construct meaning in the aforementioned context.
It pointed out that so far, in the community visits, the team has been interviewing and listening to citizens’ lived experiences and assisting in articulating concepts clearly, and in this sense meanings are constructed. Information is collected by observing (or participating) with citizens in their own settings, such as in the marketplace, public spaces, and hinterland and riverine communities.
At this level, the release said, the team gets a better sense of the unspoken rules, practices and experiences in communities such as: What are the agricultural /economic practices? Is produce locally grown or sourced from another location? Is flood relief equally distributed or have some been marginalised because of political affiliation? Are subsidies granted, and if so, has this been done in an equitable manner?
Yesterday Hughes said, “Our crisis is not money, it is our ability to manage the money fairly equitably”. It is why he urged: “We have to move from being passively upset to actively standing up for our rights. For better to come, bad must go.”
