“NATIONAL unity is a fundamental prerequisite for national development and nation-building,” Minister of State Joseph Harmon said as he addressed the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) Regional Congress at Vreed-en-Hoop, Region 3 on Sunday.According to him, the result of the May 11, 2015 General and Regional Elections is a clear indication that Guyana is “deeply divided” along racial and ethnic lines. Although there was evidence of rampant corruption, blatant nepotism, incompetence and mismanagement on the part of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government, Minister Harmon said the race card was used.
As such, he said the time had come for the cycle of racism to be broken and he underscored the importance of unity. “We, the PNCR [People’s National Congress Reform] cannot wish national unity into existence. We cannot pay lip service to this issue. We the leadership must take consorted effort to foster national unity and social cohesion. We must be the initiators of this process and we must be relentless in our pursuit of this objective,” Minister Harmon said.

In urging those present to embrace the concepts of national unity and social cohesion, the Minister of State said they must prevail countrywide. It was pointed out that the PNCR was birthed out of the concept of national unity.
Subsequent to the 1957 General Elections, then Chairman of the PPP Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham made a decisive break from that party, and established the PNC. The late President had sought to strengthen his party by absorbing the United Democratic Party (UDP) and the National Democratic Party (NDP), which were led at the time by John Carter and Rudy Kendall, respectively.
In the spirt of unity, the party in 2011 played a leading role in the formation of the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) which contested the November 2011 Elections. The Guyana Action Party, the Justice for All Party, the National Front Alliance, the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) were among the parties that formed the partnership. Ahead on the May 2015 elections, APNU merged with the Alliance for Change (AFC) on February 14, 2015.
Meanwhile, in reflecting on the last regional congress which was held by the PNCR, Minister Harmon said it was held in November 2012, at a time when members laboured under severe political pressure as the “corrupt and politically bankrupt PPP/C administration wreaked havoc over the country.
Today, there is a complete turnaround, with the PNCR through the APNU+AFC coalition once again at the forefront of national development. “We have always been in the vanguard of the national movement for development. The PNC led Guyana to independence in 1966, we established our motto – One people, One nation, One destiny – and commenced the process of making Guyana one nation,” the Minister of State pointed out as he turned back the pages of history.
“We must now see this victory as an opportunity to serve the people of this country; an opportunity to realise that potential that exists within our people, and opportunity to put in place those developmental ideas which we had since 1966; an opportunity to make Guyana great again. This is our opportunity, This is our time.”
However, Minister Harmon said the membership of the region needs to do better, pointing out that although the APNU+AFC coalition would have successfully defeated the PPP/C during the last elections, it did not win the region at the regional elections. “We cannot have the corrupted administration of the PPP running this region the way they ran the government for the last 23 years.
In 2011, the PPP/C won 65% of the regional votes securing 15,725 more votes than the APNU. In 2015, the PPP/C once again took the lead by 19, 368 votes. “We cannot have this trend continuing in the region, we cannot have that.”

By Svetlana Marshall