President Bharrat Jagdeo would be demitting the presidential office within an approximate year, so he does not need to make grandiose gestures to woo voters.  Also his popularity is established the length and breadth of the land and even his worst detractors would have to admit that if he runs for another term, he would have a massive victory at the polls.
But the President has repeated ad nauseum that he has no intention of breaching the Constitution and run for a third term, so what motivated  someone who would soon resume private life to donate a whopping US$40,000, which is no mean sum, to the indigenous community?
Throughout the duration that he has served this nation as President, Bharrat Jagdeo has demonstrated overwhelming caring for the vulnerable and the underprivileged – both at home and in the external world, and while he is answerable to regulatory bodies for disposal of State funds for developmental works in the nation, and the opposition cabal continuously lament and denigrate the spending of the Lotto funds on social enhancement initiatives, the prize money was his to dispose of as he chose, and his first choice
was to invest in the welfare of a people long neglected and treated as peripheral to the national construct by past administrative bodies in the land.
While many persons are pursuing agendas inimical to the welfare of the Amerindian peoples, including funding agencies that support individuals and agencies with political and self-empowerment and self-aggrandizement agendas, the Government continues on its path to provide relief to Guyana’s first peoples and to create systems and drive programmes that continually empower the indigenous peoples who, for decades before the advent of the current administration, were a marginalized, almost forgotten people in this land.
And while the developmental imperatives of this nation would be greatly accelerated if the Government’s LCDS generates income for this country, the Amerindian people’s welfare would always be given priority, because their contribution to the national development paradigm is now being given due recognition and respect.
The President has also pledged US$7 million of the first tranche of the Norway fund to the Amerindian people.
The opposition collective has hit a new low, in that they are saying that the Amerindians who participated in the programme at the Convention Centre were tricked into attending the celebratory event honouring President Jagdeo for the UNEP’s conferral of the Champion of the Earth award on him.
Why would there be a need to trick Amerindians to attend an event to honour President Jagdeo?  There are overwhelming numbers of Amerindians who would consider it an honour to attend an event which celebrates their President’s achievements – especially for the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), because of all the initiatives that the Government has driven to benefit Amerindian communities and enhance their lifestyles, the LCDS is the one that the indigenous peoples of Guyana can most empathise with because, in the words of the General-Secretary of the PPP, Mr. Donald Ramotar, “…it is the Amerindian people in particular who have guarded and protected our forests for centuries. His (President Jagdeo’s) actions are in recognition of their role in ensuring a healthy environment….”
Even more than that, the President’s gift to the Amerindian peoples was his personal commitment to the continuum of efforts that his administration has been unremittingly making to empower Guyana’s first peoples, while enabling them to pursue their cultural and traditional ways of life, and to ensure that they are integrated into the national framework of development, because his caring, like that of his mentor, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, is not constricted to defined parameters, but transcends every divide to encapsulate a national paradigm of development.
The President’s gift to the Amerindians is his way of ensuring that there are sufficient funds to institute mechanisms that would not be subject to scrutiny and consequential derailment of developmental imperatives within indigenous communities by those who have a history of suppressing the rights and constricting the development trajectory of this long-suppressed people.
The President’s gift to the Amerindian peoples was an act of faith that cannot be defined by a Constitution, but by the trust and caring between a leader and the most vulnerable component within Guyana’s national construct, a people who, prior to the advent of the PPP/C administration, were voiceless and powerless in the land.
The President’s gift to the Amerindians denotes him, not merely as the Champion of the Earth, but as a champion of the downtrodden, and the love and reverence accorded him by his people is perhaps the greater gift.