THE main Opposition party, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), seems ‘specialised’ in manufacturing confusion and deception, instead of focusing on the development of Guyana and the expansion of the manufacturing sector.

This view was expressed by President Donald Ramotar at the launch of Amerindian Heritage Month on Monday at the Heritage Village in the Sophia Exhibition Complex, Georgetown.
The President said it was “strange” that the Opposition coalition would lament the issue of youth unemployment when they were the ones who had crushed and “damaged” one of Guyana’s largest projects, which would have propelled Guyana’s development and would have provided jobs for young people and others within the working population.
In a press conference held last Friday, APNU leader David Granger criticised Government’s handling of the ‘job crisis’, and branded Government’s employment projects as ‘band-aid solutions’, saying that Guyana was sitting on a ‘time bomb.’
President Ramotar responded that it was the main Opposition party which had deprived Guyanese of a project that could have spurred rapid development. He declared: “they (APNU) were manufacturing excuses after excuses,” in order to justify a “narrow-mindedness that is incomprehensible”.
“Instead of concentrating on development and manufacturing goods and services, they seem to be specialised in manufacturing confusion and lies,” the President declared.
The Amaila Falls Hydropower Project (AFHP) became threatened after a lack of political consensus, occasioned when APNU withheld support for amendments to the Hydroelectric Act and a motion to increase the debt ceiling on external loans, which were critical for the project.
The President expressed frustration that the Government has been accused of putting pressure on the people by bringing a motion for an increase to the debt ceiling. “That is totally not true!” he stated, citing that the project was primarily a private sector investment of the “build, operate and transfer (BOT)” type.
“You don’t have to have brains to see that it would have been a big benefit to Guyana,” he reiterated, expounding that the price of electricity would have been reduced by 40 percent in the first stage, 71 percent in eight years’ time, and in “twenty years, when the project would have been handed over to Guyana, consumers would have been paying 90 percent less than their bill is today.”
“That is what has been deprived of us, and this is why they are manufacturing excuses after excuses,” he said, citing that it would have saved Guyana paying six billion dollars in subsidies for electricity for the coastland, and another three billion in subsidising electricity in Linden.
Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee declared earlier this week, in a People’s Progressive Party (PPP) press conference, that cheap energy would have generated attention from both local and foreign investors, and would have resulted in an explosion of jobs for young people.
“Mr. Granger and his party cannot, on one hand, sabotage efforts which will lend to the creation of jobs for Guyanese, particularly youths, and at the same time gripe about youth unemployment being a ‘ticking time bomb’,” Rohee added, declaring that it was “Granger who was sitting on a time bomb, since he was falling short of excuses, and “every time he utters a word, the magnitude of his misinformation to his constituents is being revealed.”