Tolls in bid to woo Berbice voters
want better roads, better streets, better community centres, playfields, better schools, better health centers,” he stated.
According to Nagamootoo, the Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC) in that area was supposed to make representations for road lights but did not do so because its members belong to another political party. “They want to bring down the image of the coalition government. They feel if you have lights on the road it will make the coalition look good, so don’t have lights,” he claimed.
He pointed out that NDCs are receiving $4 million in subventions apart from the rates and taxes which are being collected from residents, yet it is not being spent to improve the communities. As a result, he questioned what is being done with the funds.
“They don’t take the interest of the people at heart and they don’t do the job for which they were elected,” he said, while calling on residents to replace those that are not willing to work to better the communities.
“We want to send a clear message through the Government of Guyana that the reason why local government elections are important [is] because we want you to choose people who can work for you, choose the people in your NDC who understand your problems,” he further stressed.
He also said that presently, the PPP/C controls the Regional Democratic Council (RDC) of Region Six, “So the RDC don’t work for the communities, so it got floods all the time and they don’t go to the rice farmers, when the rice farmers don’t have markets for the rice, their paddy, they are happy because they believe that will give a bad name to the coalition government.”
During his address, the Prime Minister presented AFC candidate Mavis Nagamootoo to the gathering. He noted that Mavis, who is related to several cricketers who have excelled at the regional and international levels, wants to be a councillor because she wants to see the Whim Ground become not just a cricket centre for Whim/Bloomfield but also an international first class stadium to allow the young people to play cricket competitively.
According to him, those who said that “Mavis cannot be found” know how powerful she is.
“So they know more than anyone else that Mavis Nagamootoo is a big vote getter, a big vote catcher and…none of the trails that they put can run beside Mavis, so they targeted her,” he claimed.
He also stressed that while the coalition is intact, safe and strong, the AFC has chosen to contest the elections on its own as a tactic “because here they know they are invoking racism, you couldn’t get APNU to contest Whim/Bloomfield. You will go to war in race and they will give you all the reasons…why they shouldn’t choose APNU. But the AFC is a small, multi-ethnic party, got powerful leaders and they don’t know how to fight us, so they decide they will go and discredit us and say we are involved in fraud and trickery and forgery and threats.”
PPP supporters protested the Corentyne outreach, while APNU supporters protested the PPP’s meeting at New Amsterdam.