Lawrence issues apology
by me as leader,” he said.
Senior WPA member Dr David Hinds was critical of Lawrence. The WPA is also a member of governing coalition partner, APNU.
Hinds said it is foolish for the coalition to merely dismiss the concerns of the people over Lawrence’s statements as he believes that it has the propensity to negatively impact voters at what would be the fiercely contested 2020 general elections.
“I think it would have a negative impact on independent voters of all ethnic groups—the very group of voters that helped to push the Coalition from the PNC’s 34% share of the vote in 2006 to 51% in 2015. The Coalition needs those voters to win. But that kind of rhetoric would signal to those voters that the PNC has resorted to the old politics. The Coalition attracted those voters because they thought they were voting for something new, that the PNC had turned its back on that kind of crude politics and that the WPA and AFC would not tolerate it”, he told Stabroek News.
He said that Lawrence’s “rhetoric threatens to exhume the ghosts of the PNC’s past” and makes a mockery of the new politics promised by the coalition.
“I have sympathy for the Minister’s apparent frustration with the ethnic imbalance in the political economy which was taken to exorbitant levels by the last government. But that imbalance cannot be corrected by overt cronyism and clientelism. It never did and never will. The Minister is part of a government that has done precious little to correct that situation via a fair and just policy. So if she feels strongly about the issue, she should be urging her government in that direction. That kind of rhetoric would scare away independent voters while giving the opposition potent political ammunition to use against the government. I don’t buy the nonsense that she is only saying aloud what is the norm. If it is wrong it should not be said period,” he added.
He believes that if politicians don’t have a commonsense answer to political defeat, they panic and resort to overt race-baiting and crass calls for ethnopolitical solidarity.
That behaviour, according to Hinds would be a political disaster detrimental for the coalition come 2020.
The WPA is yet to say anything about Lawrence’s statements.
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo has said that “Volda Lawrence could be charged for this because our labour law says that you cannot discriminate against people on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, whatever else. She is making it clear that she is going to discriminate on the basis of their politics”.
Chartered accounting firm Ram and McRae condemned Lawrence’s statements.
It said in an epilogue to its annual review of the budget:
“Ms. Volda Lawrence, chairperson of the PNC/R, a cabinet member and the leading partner in the Coalition Government, is quoted in the Stabroek News as telling a PNC/R Conference: “… the only friends I got is PNC, so the only people I could give work to is PNC.”
Forget for a moment that Ms. Lawrence ignores the Reform component of her Party and recognise only that a Senior Cabinet Minister of the APNU+AFC Government publicly admits that at least sections of this Administration is openly admitting discriminatory employment with an undisguised hint of ethnic preferences. This is unconstitutional, shocking and disgraceful.
“Ms. Lawrence’s Ministry of Public Health is allocated a total sum of $25,223 million in the 2019 Budget. We note too that her Ministry has already been implicated in a number of tainted procurements amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, in violation of the law. This raises the serious possibility that the 2019 Budget, potentially the last full year Budget before the 2020 elections, will be used for discriminatory employment practices and other spending, not only in “Ms. Lawrence’s Ministry but in the Government as a whole. It therefore raises the further question about the extent to which this Budget may contain disguised political spending.
With the major political parties each having a strong ethnic base, the statement reinforces the public racism narrative, and leaves the most apolitical, objective observer in Guyana with little option but to question whether this is an embedded policy among party leaders.
Five days after this disgraceful statement, neither the President, her Cabinet colleagues nor any of the leaders of the Coalition Parties have found this egregiously offensive declaration objectionable to them. This is ominous and may set the stage for one of the most confrontational campaigns for what her colleague Minister described as the “mother of all elections.”
Lawrence’s statements came while PNCR Leader and President, David Granger has been unwell and is being treated for lymphoma. No senior government official has yet commented on her statements.