President Bharrat Jagdeo’s recent criticism of the PNC’s tenure in government and APNU’s presidential candidate David Granger has been labelled “callous, repugnant and distasteful” by the youth arm of the PNCR, which says he is trying to “brainwash” the nation’s young people.
At the Impress Youth Expo, organised by the Youths for PPP/C group at the International Convention Centre, on Thursday, Jagdeo urged attendees to know their history in order to make conscious decisions about the country’s future.
In addressing the history of the rule of the People’s National Congress, he painted a dismal picture of a Guyana where “you could be jailed for cooking the wrong pot,” and said the PNC’s time in office was “an era where there was no democracy,” and where the country became one of the most heavily indebted in the world. He said too that there was not one good road and power outages lasted for weeks.
The Guyana Youth and Student Movement (GYSM), in a press statement yesterday, accused Jagdeo of attempting “to brainwash” the youths gathered at Expo about the PNC’s time in office.
“Was Mr. Jagdeo serious when he told the gathering that there was once an era here when “the police would come and check your pot and if you were cooking the wrong item they would take you off to jail?” the GYSM asked, while saying that his comments were evidence that he could not hear himself when he speaks. The GYSM noted that “with one mouth, he told the people of Buxton to forget about the past and yet he stood at the [Convention Centre] preaching about “so called” occurrences of decades ago as he continues to fabricate and lie to this nation.”
It added that “Mr. Jagdeo further continues to twist the words of Granger regarding the national service,” while noting that he has on many occasions said that national service, under his regime, would be voluntary.
President Jagdeo and his government, the GYSM said, should be ashamed to talk about the importance of youth, when they were silent on The United Nations General Assembly resolution proclaiming the International Year for Youth and also failed to deal with the primary education dropout rate and joblessness among youths.
“[He] needs to tell the youth why his government failed to provide jobs for young people [and] why University of Guyana is in the state that it’s in. We are the youths of today not then and the PPP/C is the government of the day,” the GYSM said.
