AFC chairman Nigel Hughes has endorsed the party’s vice-chairman Moses Nagamootoo to be the Presidential candidate for the next general elections and says that he is willing to serve in any position to which he is elected by the membership.
“I fully support (AFC leader Khemraj Ramjattan’s) nomination for Nagamootoo to be the presidential candidate,” Hughes told Stabroek News yesterday. On Saturday, Ramjattan told Stabroek News that he supports a Nagamootoo/Hughes ticket for general elections and said that he believes that they are a team capable of running the party and they can gain countrywide support. Noting that he was speaking in his personal capacity, he endorsed Nagamootoo for the position of Presidential candidate and Hughes to be the Prime Ministerial candidate.
The AFC will formally identify and elect its team during its congress next month as it prepares for what is likely to be early general elections.
Hughes told Stabroek News yesterday that he supports Ramjattan’s views and emphasised that the party will decide during its elections next month. He added that he is willing to serve in any capacity that the party will elect him to.
With Ramjattan indicating his feeling that as leader of the AFC, he strongly feels that he can influence the party in that direction, barring any surprises, a Nagamootoo/Hughes ticket appears to be a foregone conclusion. Unless there is some sort of alliance, the duo would likely face-off with President Donald Ramotar as the PPP’s presidential candidate and Opposition leader David Granger for APNU.
The AFC has filed a motion of no-confidence against the Ramotar-led administration, which, if passed, would trigger early general elections. APNU has indicated its support for the motion and the two parties combined hold a one-seat majority in the National Assembly – enough to pass the motion. The motion is likely to be considered in October when the National Assembly reconvenes. However, analysts have said that the Ramotar administration would likely want to pre-empt the opposition’s vote of no-confidence against it and call general elections before the motion is considered.
Problematical
Political analyst Christopher Ram has hailed a Nagamootoo/ Hughes ticket describing it as an “ideal formulation for the AFC at this stage.”
Yesterday, political analyst Dr. Henry Jeffrey told Stabroek News that Nagamootoo being head of the AFC ticket could be helpful while in relation to Hughes, “his politics is good but his profile is problematical.”
Jeffrey, a former longstanding PPP/C government minister said that although it was Nagamootoo who first publicly voiced the possibility of a vote of no-confidence against the government and the PPP will definitely attempt to use this fact, “if it appears that a new elections can lead to a change in government and a new way of the parties cooperating, his being head of the ticket could be helpful.”
He pointed out that after all, it was Nagamootoo’s effect that most people believe is largely responsible for the opposition’s majority in parliament.
Meantime, Hughes’ politics is good but his profile is problematical and “the AFC has to be careful that what Nagamootoo brings Hughes does not lose,” Jeffrey said. He stated that Hughes’ politics about the need for constitutional reform cannot be faulted “although many believe that he is saying these things because they are attractive to Africans but there are no visible signs that he is fighting hard for them in the AFC.”
According to Jeffrey, from the profile standpoint, the PPP will milk the Amails Falls Hydro Project conflict-of-interest issue over which Hughes offered his resignation, the problem with the foreman of the jury at the Lusignan massacre trial, among other issues.
The conflict-of-interest issue arose last year after it was revealed that Hughes was Company Secretary of the Amaila Falls Hydropower Inc, the company set up to pilot the contentious Amaila Falls Hydroelectric project. Hughes subsequently offered to step down as AFC Chairman over his link to the project but the AFC refused to accept his resignation, saying it had “full confidence” in him. Last year too, a furore erupted after it was brought to the attention of the High Court that Hughes and the foreman of the jury in the trial of two Lusignan massacre accused once shared a lawyer-client relationship.
Jeffrey said that outside of these issues, the AFC’s position that it will not have some kind of pre-election arrangement with APNU to create a better chance of their wining the elections, will certainly not go down well with its African supporters and perhaps even to those of its Indian supporters who are looking for change. He said that APNU leader David Granger also has not been very helpful in attempting to bring them around to such an arrangement.
“His bald public call upon them to join the APNU, something they have historically stated they will not do, was not helpful. He (Granger) needs to place a request in a more flexible framework of the two of them working to find mutual solutions and together help to change the nature of governance in Guyana,” Jeffrey asserted.
However, he also noted that the PPP talk of a national alliance might upstage both the AFC and APNU if it should opportunistically claim that it is clear that the present system is not working and that after the next elections, whether it wins the majority or not, the PPP will seek cooperation from the other parties to find some governance solutions to Guyana’s problem. “In this context, it needs to be as strong as possible to negotiate with the APNU and is calling on its usual supporters to give it a full mandate,” Jeffrey noted while adding that once the PPP takes this route, APNU will follow and “these maneuvers can only disadvantage the AFC.”
Notwithstanding that, he emphasised that the PPP has a record of not keeping agreements. He pointed to the Linden agreement that brought an end to protests there in 2012 as well as other agreements with former PNCR leader Robert Corbin and the late President Desmond Hoyte and said that “there is no reason to believe it will do so if it wins a majority or the plurality.”
Jeffrey asserted that if the opposition decides to go to the election individually, it would appear that they are offering more of the same and “this I do not believe would be able to stymie a drift back” to the PPP. “They need to create and sell to the public a more promising future,” he declared while adding that electoral politics is never as simple as it appears.
