Dear Editor,
I listened to part of a statement by an APNU candidate, one Thandi McAllister who also serves as a Legal Officer within a state institution, the Maritime Administration (MARAD). Her statement to the effect that after 4 years and 6 months, the APNU “has done more than the PPP/C in their 23 years” is patently inaccurate.
So let us help her by looking at the numbers. We can start with the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, which is the average wealth distributed per person within a country. In 1993, the first full year of the PPP/C in office, the GNI per capita was US$460. That was the average earning power of the average Guyanese in that year. At the end of 2014, the last complete year of the PPP/C in office, the GNI per capita was US$4,040. This translates to average annual growth in the wealth of our people at approximately 35% per year between 1993 and 2014 during the PPPC administration. The comparable data under Team Granger and the APNU between 2016 and 2019 was 4% per year. The source of this data is the World Bank’s Development Indicators.
So what is Ms. McAllister talking about? How can she get her facts so twisted?
Is this the kind of public official that this nation needs at a policy-making level? How can she serve all of Guyana when her views are so biased and inaccurate?
But there is a moral imperative here. Do you think that the person who sits in the comparative role in the MARAD of Jamaica, one Ms. Vanessa Stewart would be caught on a PNP or JLP political platform and still hold on to her job in the public service? In those societies like Jamaica, people like Ms. Stewart would have done the right thing; the decent thing; the morally upright thing and requested a “No-pay leave of absence” during the political campaign. It is immoral for one to feed off of the tax dollars from all taxpayers but then seek to only represent some of them in your public political utterances.
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh
