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Mar 21, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

The Minister of Finance’s response to the recent statement of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) on the proposed transition from paper-based to electronic formatting of personal data, chose to completely ignore the substance and concentrated on slandering the GHRA itself. The delayed response by the GHRA to this attack in the state media is rooted firstly in a reluctance to engage with this demeaning response and, secondly, by the thought of who would read it in any event.

All of the allegations made about the GHRA: its Executive Board, finances, its political impartiality, and the legitimacy of its elections, are false and baseless. The continuous hostility and vindictiveness of the current Government towards any criticism emanating from civil society is sufficient for the GHRA and others to ensure we have all our ducks in a row as far as routine legal and financial matters are concerned.

Indeed, the staff of Guyana Chronicle, and the social and televised official media involved in this tarnished form of journalism are more aware than most that servility in the service of the Government is the best policy for keeping their jobs.

Even employees as lofty as a Minister of Finance in the Office of the President apparently, for example, continue to feel forced to dwell incessantly on the 2020 elections.

While the Minister recounted all of the misconduct the GHRA supposedly never addressed during the APNU/AFC Government, he himself knows nothing of it first-hand, having scuttled away immediately after the 2015 elections only to re-surface after the PPP 2020 victory. This no doubt accounts for his parroting the untruth that the GHRA issued no press releases on the electoral shambles. The GHRA issued four – all sent to the Guyana Chronicle – focusing primarily on the failure of the GECOM Chair to make a declaration of the election results and then use her casting vote to ensure approval by GECOM in order to bring the fiasco to an end.

With the exception of the five years of the APNU government, the PPP have exercised political power for the past thirty years. Prior to the discovery of oil, little was achieved economically and nothing by way of inclusive politics. Its chronic inability to deliver coincides with its anti-civil society ideology. The PPP has clung to the illusion that the party alone defeated the PNC in the 1992 elections, rather than a coalition of civic and business forces in the GUARD movement in which the GHRA played a leading role in delivering free and fair elections. Moreover, an obsessive focus on wealth rather than well-being has diverted attention from the real task of building political inclusivity through a viable domestic alliance incorporating civic, religious, business and political sectors.

Regards,

Executive Committee

Guyana Human Rights Association

Elections, Guyana Chronicle, Guyana Human Rights Association, Minister of Finance, political

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