Latest update January 7th, 2025 4:10 AM
Latest News
APNU and AFC clash over Prime Ministerial candidate
The Alliance for Change (AFC) has revealed that its negotiations with coalition partner, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), have stalled over differences of opinion on who gets to select the coalition’s prime ministerial candidate.
AFC Leader, Khemraj Ramjattan
The APNU side is now contending that it is the President’s exclusive Constitutional right to appoint a Prime Minister, despite allowing its lesser coalition partner to choose the Prime Ministerial candidate to contest the previous election.
The two parties had signed the initial Cummingsburg Accord to contest the 2015 General and Regional Elections. That agreement gave APNU the choice to select the party’s presidential candidate, while the AFC copped the selection of the prime ministerial candidate.
The difference now is that the AFC’s choice for that post is its new Leader, Khemraj Ramjattan, instead of current Prime Minister, Moses Nagamootoo. Sources say that APNU’s change of heart may be due to not wanting Ramjattan to be the candidate.
Ramjattan was voted to be the party’s new Leader at its National Conference last June. But APNU had kept itself a distance from the announcement. Constantly questioned by the media, its members had repeated that it was yet to discuss – let alone, endorse – Ramjattan as the coalition’s prime ministerial candidate.
During a press conference at AFC’s Kitty Headquarters, the party’s Treasurer, Dominic Gaskin, brought the news to the fore after weeks of silence from both parties on the direction negotiations were going.
He posited that despite APNU’s protests, it’s the party’s given right to select the PM candidate in keeping with the Cummingsburg Accord. It is a “fundamental and non-negotiable tenet of the party’s decision to form a coalition.”
Gaskin made it clear that there hasn’t been an outright rejection of the party’s candidate by APNU; just that there is “a lack of consensus”. The party has said that it will not proceed in discussions with its coalition partner until this matter is resolved.
Vice Chair, Catherine Hughes, iterated that the AFC is the only successful independent party to emerge when Guyana was “faced with growing racial intolerance and the prospect of continued corruption”.
In that regard, she said that she’s confident of the support of those who have stood with the party in the past.
Asked whether the AFC is interested in coalescing with any partner other than the APNU, Gaskin said that, while the party has not specifically considered another coupling, it is open to forming alliances with anyone of similar convictions. One of those convictions must be on the matter of Constitutional Reform, Hughes said.
Like previous utterances by AFC members, Gaskin said that coalition politics in Guyana is heavily endorsed by the party. However, another coalition has not been a topic of discussion within the party, according to its Treasurer.
He further revealed that the party’s National Executive Committee Meeting will be held on November 2, 2019, at which the party will discuss and decide definitively on how it will participate in the General and Regional Elections.
Similar Articles
THE BLUNT OF THE DAY
Sports
Features/Columnists
Boxing should be banned
Peeping Tom… Kaieteur News- Olympic boxing now finds itself as at a crossroads. A recent report in the Kaieteur News... more
Forget Begging Rich Nations: Caribbean Countries Should Act to Save Themselves
By Sir Ronald Sanders Kaieteur News- It has long been evident that the world’s richest nations, especially those responsible... more
Weekend Cartoon
