Guyana president, Donald Ramotar (Credit: caricom.org)
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Friday June 27, 2014, CMC – President Donald Ramotar Wednesday signalled that his People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) is prepared for a general election if the opposition goes ahead with its threat to move a motion of no-confidence in his administration.
The PPP/C does not hold a majority in the 65-member national assembly with the opposition parties – A Partnership for National unity (APNU) and the Alliance for Change (AFC) – holding one seat majority.
AFC Vice Chairman Moses Nagamootoo told the privately-owned Stabroek Newspaper that a no-confidence vote by the opposition could come before the Parliament soon.
He said one of the reasons for considering a no-confidence motion was the fact that government has already spent GUY$4.5 billion (one Guyana dollar =US$0.004 cents) of the GUY$37.4 billion which had been cut from the GUY$220 billion budget for the fiscal year 2014-15.
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But as he addressed the Annual General Meeting of the Private Sector Commission (PSC), Ramotar said that his administration was not afraid of facing the electorate. The last election was held here on November 28, 2011.
“We do not take threats. If the opposition wants to pass a no-confidence bill, let them pass it and we will be ready to deal with the consequences of that,” he said, adding “when I say I am going to do it, I am going to do it. I wouldn’t even say it.”
In his address, President Ramotar also responded to a call for a date to be named for the long overdue local government elections.
United States Ambassador to Guyana Brent Hardt has dismissed government’s latest excuse for not holding local government elections saying it was time Guyanese directly elect their representatives at the local level.
“To my mind, it’s a constitutional requirement, it’s a legislative requirement and there is at this point no obstacle to the holding of local government elections so I would just urge government to set a date, move forward as soon as possible and give people that ability to have effective local governance and start to transform the country,” he told the Guyana-based Demerara Waves Online News.
But President Ramotar, in an apparent reference to United States practice of listening to the phone calls of people worldwide, said such actions were undermining democracy.
“What undermines democracy is when you listen to everybody’s telephone calls and read their emails and ban them from having collective bargaining in their own country in different parts of North America and Europe,” he told the business community.
Ramotar said that while he was eager for local government elections there were some uncertainties in the body politic reiterating that the lack of local government elections meant that his administration was undermining democracy.
The last Local Government elections were held on August 8, 1994 with the ruling PPP-C winning 80 percent of the Councils.
But for various reasons, the Local Government elections planned for 1997 did not materialise and the National Assembly deferred the 1997 elections to one year later. Since then, numerous obstacles have impeded Local Government elections even though the government in 2004 had named the month of October as the month for the polls.
In January 2013, a joint statement issued by the United States Ambassador D Brent Hardt, the United Kingdom High Commissioner Andrew Ayre, his Canadian counterpart David Devine and Robert Kopecky, the European Union diplomat here, recalled that during the 2011 national elections “one issue on which all political parties were in full agreement was the need to hold local government elections.”
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Guyana ruling party ready for general election
