No to shared governance with APNU+AFC
Messrs Sean Ori and Ruel Johnson wrote letters in yesterday’s Stabroek News touting ‘shared governance’ as a benefit to Guyana, Editor, while they arrived at their conclusions on differing bases, Ori by his rejection of all political parties and Johnson by hopeless pseudo-intellectual gymnastics to avoid saying that APNU+AFC is a miserable failure (too many writing workshops can lead to obfuscation) both are hopelessly wrong.
To ask any political organization to share governance space with a grossly and possibly criminally incompetent administration is to ask for expediency over principle; it is also to deny the people of the land a democratic right of choice.
Editor, to list the misadventures of the APNU+AFC administration is an onerous task; one is always cognizant of length of missive versus the small booklet a complete listing would require. Suffice to say, many (myself included) will strenuously resist any attempt to share governance with an APNU+AFC administration that has been and continues to be profligate from its first week in office to present day; an administration that has rendered useless all the prudent fiscal management that got us to healthy reserves in 2015 and brought us back to a 49% Debt to GDP ratio; an administration, who, despite five ever increasing budgets which now total over a Trillion dollars, have begun no new projects and delivered none started under the PPP; an administration whose entire cabinet abetted a Minister to bypass the procurement laws.
Editor, the fallacy that APNU+AFC somehow represents ‘Afro-Guyanese’ and the PPP the ‘Indo’ is one of those statements in Guyana’s politics that are repeated so often that they become pseudo-fact; I have spent the last three years putting my feet to pavement and doing my own investigations. I have found for example that the PPP is more than the ‘Indian’ party, its leadership is diverse by any factor of examination, there are for example over 3000 black members of the party, more than the WPA, JFAP, NDF, NFA and AFC combined, Indigenous representation is high and there is no ‘tokenism’, we do not need shared governance for all ethnicities to be represented, we possibly need more parties that encourage ethnic diversity of membership, but that is a matter for those organizations.
Editor, I read an historical report which stated that at one time Guyana had 65 political parties, currently we have around ten active parties, no doubt more are being formed also, I would like to ask proponents of shared governance if are we to include or exclude these from administration? Should we shelve GECOM, save the Billions and divvy the pie in backrooms? I suggest we are fortunate to be living in a healthy democracy and we should continue to have the right to choose who serve as Administrators for the foreseeable future, if it’s not broke don’t fix it. Yours faithfully, Robin Singh