It is up to Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Claudette Singh to say when elections can be held and government will follow her recommendation even if an October date is given, Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan said on Saturday.
“She is there today and she will have to vote and put her hand up whether the registration exercise must come to an end. She will have to vote to say whether now is the time that we can finish so that Mr President, you will have the elections by December month or whenever,” the minister told a meeting at Springlands, Corriverton, Region Six. “We agree that she must call and make the call,” he said.
“We are going to wait and ask her ‘Madame, are you ready?’, ‘When you ready?’, and then when she say that the list is going to have all the names of those who are valid voters by December, November, whenever, even if is October she say it, well then we are going to hold elections by that time,” he added.
With elections constitutionally due following a successful no-confidence motion against the APNU+AFC government, GECOM is deadlocked on the way forward. President David Granger has maintained that it is GECOM that has to advise him on the date for elections based on its readiness. However, some government ministers have been indicating a date in December.
On Saturday, a large number of persons protested Ramjattan’s meeting and shouted continuously during his speech, calling for the government to resign and call elections.
Ramjattan told Corriverton residents that Singh, a retired judge, is the perfect person for the job.
According to him, she knows the elections laws better than any other judge. “She did a case some 15 years ago, the Esther Perreira case, and in that case, I was the lawyer with Ralph Ramkarran and in that case we quoted so much law to her that she had to know the election law more than anybody,” he said.
“She is now, today, the perfect judge that is the chairman of GECOM, the most fit, the most proper person to be chairman,” he said, while adding that it is Singh who will have to indicate when GECOM is ready for the polls.
Meantime, Ramjattan also told the small gathering that now is not the time to return the PPP to government because of their bad and corrupt decisions. “I am not saying that we haven’t had our mistakes in this last four and a half years but every time there have been a mistake, we have investigated it immediately,” he said.
42 policemen
He pointed out that after allegations of police officers being corrupt emerged, investigations were launched “and indeed we have knocked off about 42 policemen. That never could have happened under the PPP.”
He said too that the Guyana Police Force’s crime solving rate has increased. According to Ramjattan, from 2015 to now, serious crimes have reduced by 25 per cent. “It used to reach per annum over 4,000 in 2013, then it drop to 3,800, then it drop to 3,700 and from 2015 to now, it has dropped to 2,800, that’s a big decline,” he said.
Additionally, the crime rate on the sea has been reduced to almost zero per cent overall, the minister said. “We have professionalised and will continue to professionalise the police force,” he asserted. He added that they have also ensured that the emergency 911 service works and are working towards securing more patrol vehicles for the force.
The minister also called out PPP presidential candidate Irfaan Ali and Opposi-tion Leader Bharrat Jagdeo multiple times during his 44-minute address. He highlighted that Ali will have to appear in court today in relation to 19 charges and also criticised Jagdeo’s decisions in relation to the sugar industry.
Ramjattan said that the PPP’s massive corruption while in government is what caused them to lose the 2015 elections “and today they will have all of us being confused as if they didn’t do any wrong.”
The minister told those gathered that a Commission of Inquiry was set up so as to ensure the right decision was made in the sugar sector. “When we got into the administration, we knew that sugar was not going to be profitable,” he said while adding that a decision was then made to right-size the industry by closure and privatisation of various estates.
According to Ramjattan, for the first 36 months of being in government, the APNU+AFC administration had to “take $1 billion per month” to run the Skeldon factory and the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo).
“Normally, you would get GuySuCo, the rice, sugar, bauxite, gold bringing in money into the treasury (but) what we however had was that we had to give GuySuCo $1 billion a month for 36 months until we rightsized it and say ‘hold on’ this country got other workers [other] than sugar workers. It got policemen, it got nurses, it got teachers, it got soldiers; we got to pay them…’”
He recalled that since 2004, the European Union had told former president Jagdeo to “stop doing what you are doing because it is not going to have a future. Sugar will not be a big player because there are so many other alternatives to it now.”
He said the money that was being used to subsidise the sugar industry has been put to other purposes such as rehabilitation of police stations and tackling piracy. Money was freed up for the education sector as well. “We are doing better. We have to pay our teachers better and we have monies to pay our teachers better [and] they are going to perform better,” he said.
