A meeting scheduled for next month could offer a new beginning for APNU members, according to Working People’s Alliance (WPA) executive member, David Hinds who said on Monday that while the party is committed to making the government work, some of its members are calling for disengagement.
“We are firmly committed to making this government work because we have been in the trenches for 40-odd years trying to bring about change in this country and we feel that the present government has a unique opportunity to bring about some semblance of change in this country. So we have worked hard to put this government into power and we do not want to bring the government down. That is not part of our calculation,” he said during a press conference. He made it clear that the party does not want to go the route of disengagement.
The decision to hold the meeting was among the outcomes of an engagement between a WPA team and a government delegation headed by President David Granger. The meeting is scheduled for July 22. There has been no meeting of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) members since government took office in May 2015. APNU is made up of the PNCR, WPA, the GAP, the NFA, the Guyana People’s Partnership, the Guyana National Congress, and the National Democratic Front and other groups. APNU and the Alliance For Change comprise the governing coalition.
Hinds told reporters that the meeting will offer a new beginning that will take into consideration the consequences for the government of not consulting with its partners over the last two years. “In that sense we are optimistic. After all we are concerned about moving this country forward…Therefore we assume that our partners are ready to take that next step and if our meeting on Saturday was anything to go by there was an expression of recognition of our concerns and the needs to go forward as fraternal parties in the coalition,” he said.
He added that all the WPA wants is to be meaningfully engaged as well as to be able to play a significant role in shaping policy and the vision of the government. “We in the WPA are less concerned about numbers,” he said adding that it all has to do with the content of government.
According to Hinds, there is a range of options in the WPA about how the party should treat with the government. Hinds informed that the party had postponed its members’ meeting over the last year because “we are very confident that if we were to hold a members’ meeting that there will be a strong opinion… for us to disengage from the government.” He said that others are open to the party continuing to work with government and he noted that all the views inside the party have to be managed.
“Every day we are being hammered by our members both in Guyana and overseas and …also our supporters about our relations with the government and the fact that we have been relatively silent on what many see as wrong turns by the government and I just want to say that the WPA comes out of a different tradition from our partners.
We come out of the radical tradition of the 1970s and that political tradition is one in which we feel that there must be a voice in society to critique governments…and authority,” he said, while adding that based on what happens at the meeting, the party will know what to tell its members.
In response to those who believe that the WPA is not a major contributor to government since it does not bring in votes, Hinds said that the WPA has played an integral part including contributing to the writing of the manifesto. “We do not feel that we should be taken for granted. There are areas of national discourse… and policy that we in the WPA are eminently qualified to be part of. On the issue of sugar… the coming oil economy… social cohesion. These are areas in which we are deeply rooted and that we can inform the shaping of policy,” he said, adding that “in the last two years we have not been involved in shaping of policy and we feel that the time has come for that to come to an end.”
Another executive member Tacuma Ogunseye said that in the absence of the APNU meeting, the ministries are being run by cabinet decisions. “The kind of involvement that the parties ought to have in shaping policy did not take place because the political leadership at the APNU was not meeting. So it is a unique situation and the WPA has to be very careful because we have to bear in mind that as a coalition we never discussed how we interpreted cabinet responsibility and how we will deal with the cabinet and that is important because different parties have different interpretations of cabinet confidentiality,” he said.
Ogunseye stated that during the meeting the party intends to have a frank discussion with the partners. “There we will use the opportunity to assess the way in which they respond to our concerns and after that exercise we will come back and we will decide on a line of action but our approach to this matter is to try to be as objective as possible and try to enter the discourse with over 100% goodwill because that meeting could have a very serious impact on the future relations between the WPA and our partners. So for us it is a very important meeting and we are going out of our way to handle it with delicacy and caution,” he said.
He said after that exercise the WPA will decide how it deals politically with APNU and the wider coalition.
