The General Secretary of the PPP, and Guyana’s Vice President, Dr. Bharat Jagdeo, updated Guyanese on the success of the PPP’s What’s App where citizens could submit recommendations for inclusion in the PPP’s Election 2025 manifesto. Thousands of Guyanese have submitted recommendations and the PPP has kept the facility open for further recommendations. While awaiting further submissions, the PPP has begun the sorting and processing of the recommendations. The GS has indicated that many thoughtful recommendations have been made.
While the PPP has routinely consulted with citizens in face-to-face encounters to hear their views and reflect some of these in their previous manifestos and development plans, the What’s App instrument for citizens to provide their suggestions represented an innovation that permits thousands of citizens to be engaged. The novel idea has attracted attention and general commendation in Guyana and in the Guyanese diaspora across the world. But it has also attracted commendation among citizens of other countries. One can expect to see the What’s App version or similar initiatives duplicated among political parties in other countries in elections coming up.
The Leader of the Opposition PNC announced this week that the PNC will establish a What’s App number for citizens to send in their recommendations for the PNC’s Election 2025 manifesto. In so doing, the PNC leader has chosen to imitate the PPP. While it is a PPP idea, the PPP does not own this as a propriety right. Therefore, the PNC is free to utilize this novel idea.
It is good to see that the PNC’s leader has recognized that the PPP has given birth to a fantastic idea, one worthy of unconditional recognition and one worthy of emulation. Of course, the PNC leader failed to acknowledge that he and his party has “stolen” an idea from the PPP. He announced this pathway as if it is entirely his and his party’s idea.
Aubrey Norton, in fact, failed to realize that had he given credit to the PPP he would have gained goodwill, not just from the PPP, but also from citizens who would have recognized the maturity in conceding that the PPP gave birth to a great idea that they were willing to unconditionally acknowledge.
The VP had his own recommendations for Norton, including that PNC acknowledges the PNC’s history of rigging elections, the PNC’s brazen attempt to thief Elections 2020, and for the PNC to finally release their copies of Elections 2020 SOPs. These are not petty suggestions to Aubrey Norton. These are actions that might liberate the PNC and liberate Norton himself.
There must be smart people in and around the PNC. When will it occur to them that their history of rigging elections is not a secret? Their own supporters know this history and, in private, many of their supporters admit this. Their brazen attempt to thief Elections 2020 in the plain view of the world is well-known. The leaders of the PNC and the AFC know that the people of Guyana, including the vast majority of their own supporters, know the truth. This must sit on their chest as a psychological scar, like an albatross that gets heavier and tighter around their necks. Admitting this, as VP Bharat Jagdeo suggests, might well liberate the leaders of the PNC.
In this regard, it is amusing and disgraceful at the same time that the PNC MP, Annette Ferguson, who criminally tried to remove the parliamentary Mace, who was an important player in the brazen attempt to thief Elections 2020, and who clearly is trying to find relevance attacked Bharat Jagdeo for calling the Guyanese people “stupid”. But Bharat Jagdeo never called the Guyanese people “stupid”. The VP, indeed, mused aloud that the handful of people who “buy” the lies and misrepresentation of the opposition and their surrogates must be stupid. At no point did the VP referred to the Guyanese people as “stupid”. He was referring to the handful who knowing the truth still “buys” the lies and misrepresentation.
When the PNC, the AFC and their surrogates tried to get the general public to “buy” the lie that a violent protest which the opposition were very much a part of was as a result of PPP-sponsored “thugs”, those handful that actually took the bait had to be stupid. The alternative is that they were part of the conspiracy. Bharat Jagdeo was making an argument supported by facts.
Annette Ferguson, however, is hypocritical. She accused the VP of calling people “scrapes”. But Annette Ferguson herself was part of a press conference held in Tuschen at the scene where 11-year-old Adrianna died where several leaders of the PNC, AFC and others profess their support for the “scrapes”.
The truth is that Elections 2025 is nearly here. In a few months it will be elections in Guyana. We know this not only because elections are constitutionally due by December 1, 2025, but because the President and Vice President have repeatedly stated that Elections 2025 will be held as constitutionally mandated. But there is one other sure sign that elections season is here. The opposition is using every single opportunity to create mayhem.
The protests associated with the death of Adianna Younge is not one genuinely stirred by the call for justice. While there are many Guyanese who want answers, the opposition and their surrogates clearly hijacked the child’s death for political mischief. But we saw several incidents in the same geographical area of Georgetown that signal a new wave of violence in Guyana. The bomb attack on the police station, the bomb attack on a GPL facility and the setting of a community center on fire, all in the same area, all about the same time, defies coincidence. It clearly gives rise to suspicion that an organized plan to create mayhem is afoot.
Buckle-up, the only thing that the PNC knows well to do – rig elections and create violent chaos.