Government and opposition have made little headway in the resumption of tripartite talks, over a month since the last engagement.
Speaking to the Stabroek News yesterday, AFC Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan said there were a number of attempts to fix meetings but each time something would come up rendering the meeting postponed. Efforts to contact Presidential Adviser on Governance Gail Teixeira proved futile.
“We were supposed to have a meeting on Tuesday [June 26] and Sunday [July 1] but it never came off because the President was busy,” Ramjattan said.
It was hoped that the parties would have continued to try to find common ground in the wake of bitter sentiments across the floor surrounding the opposition’s latest exercise of parliamentary control in burying Financial Paper 9/2011.
Despite this action on the part of the APNU and AFC, the government said it was committed to continuing along the path of dialogue, which commenced at the beginning of the year.
Ramjattan said that at the next meeting, the AFC representatives will raise the ongoing NCN issue and would be requesting a report of the investigation done. He also hopes to raise issues such as NICIL, local government elections and the court action that the Attorney General has brought against the budget cuts. In addition to these, he intends to bring attention to the current NCN investigation, the Public Procurement Commission and parliamentary governance concerns to the meeting.
He noted that the party would have liked to be back in the talks, while recalling that the AFC was shut out of the last meeting when there was a mix up in the confirmation of that meeting.
