CHAIRMAN of the Alliance For Change (AFC) Khemraj Ramjattan says the leadership of his party and the A Partnership for National Unity is “tremendously cordial” and he restated that the two will be contesting the upcoming local government elections as a coalition.

Former Deputy Mayor Lionel Jaikarran did not receive support from the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) representatives at the recent mayoral elections at the Georgetown City Council and instead nominated and seconded Councillor Akeem Peter of APNU to be second-in-command to Mayor Patricia Chase-Green.

When asked what is happening on the lower tier with APNU and AFC representatives, Ramjattan said “it’s personality types, you even have that in a homogeneous party, whereby the leaders of that party might not get along.”
He continued: “But you can have members on the ground being very critical and fighting it out and being abusive, and that happens even in homogeneous parties. In our coalition government, I must say we have had our disagreements, but we dealt with them very professionally and we thrashed them out and came to a middle ground, and we debate very heavily in cabinet.”

Ramjattan went further and praised President David Granger for his assistance with security matters, noting that in the life of politics there will always be disagreements on a small and large scale. He said many are of the opinion that because the government is one of coalition in nature that there ought not to be disagreements. “It happened even when the PNC was there and even when the PPP was there as one unit, ministers have arguments.”

He said the recent Georgetown City Council elections provided a democratic decision which all will have to respect, and those who voted the way they did may not have liked the principled decisions of AFC representatives Sherod Duncan and Lionel Jaikarran.

Ramjattan however, noted: “We had made a decision that we are going as a coalition, we have to thrash out a number of issues in relation to candidacy, candidates and a number of other things, because we have seen an unfortunate development in the municipality and we indicated that the attitude of especially the town clerk has left a lot of things bothering us.”

He said the party will indicate to the APNU officials these concerns and a letter has been dispatched to President Granger, who is leader of the APNU.