Latest update April 4th, 2025 12:14 AM
President, Opposition Leader at odds on conditions for dialogue
President Irfaan Ali
Kaieteur News – Dialogue between President, Irfaan Ali, and the Opposition Leader (OL), Joseph Harmon, on matters pertinent to Guyana’s development, may not transpire anytime soon as the two continue to butt heads over the issue.
And while David Patterson, Shadow Oil and Gas Minister and Opposition Member of Parliament, announced that the Opposition is willing to work with the Government, President Ali, has made it explicitly clear that he will not meet with Harmon for dialogue until the opposition leader retract his previous utterances on the ‘illegitimacy’ of People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government.
President Ali reiterated his position on Thursday last, while responding to questions on Government’s collaboration with the Opposition.
Opposition Leader, Joseph Harmon
“I am saying to you now that the Leader of the Opposition needs to recognize the government with the President and I don’t want implicit recognition, he must go out there publicly and say, the government is legitimate and he recognizes the government, the president, and then let’s talk,” the Head of State responded.
The OL on the other hand in a subsequent statement, offered his “considered rejection” of President Ali’s notion. He deemed the President’s assertion an “absurd proposition” and a mere continuation of the obstinacy in refusing to engage in dialogue. Nevertheless, Harmon detailed that he is prepared to meet with the President in the best interest of advancing the cause of the Guyanese people.
Harmon stated, “It continues to be clear as day that the PPP regime and President Ali has no interest in genuine consultation and dialogue; he has no interest in all Guyanese who he claims to represent; he has no interest in One Guyana. He is purely and adamantly concerned only with being in power and less than half of Guyana who represent the PPP supporters.”
The OL maintains that Guyana’s constitution sets no pre-conditions for consultations for dialogue between the President and the Leader of the Opposition. Although the election process finally came to an end on August 2 last, after a five-month impasse, which required a CARICOM Supervised Recount to confirm that the PPP/C won the March 2, 2020 Elections fair and square, statements emerging from Coalition Opposition, and Harmon himself, continue to suggest that the government is “illegal” and “illegitimate.”
Taking it a step further, the party filed two elections petitions in the High Court to challenge the results, despite the widely publicized election being deemed “free, fair and transparent” by a host of international electoral observers – one of those petitions has since been dismissed.
The aforementioned formed the basis of President Ali’s contention that it would be an impossible feat to have cordial relations with a regime you do not consider legal. Nevertheless, Harmon continued in his statement, “Mr. Ali and his handlers in the PPP can decide whether they want to put the country first, as I am prepared to do, or they wish to continue with their discriminatory, partisan and isolationist approach.”
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