– President Granger says parties, supporters have been alerted

PRESIDENT David Granger said the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) Coalition is gearing up for General and Regional Elections.

“We are preparing and we are prepared to enter elections,” President Granger told journalists during a press conference at the Ministry of the Presidency on Thursday. President Granger is the Leader of the People’s National Congress/Reform (PNC/R), the major party within the partnership, and Chairman of APNU.

According to him, for almost nine months, the APNU+AFC Coalition has been putting certain preparations in place. “Actually, our supporters in the coalition, in our partnership, in the respective parties have been alerted to what needs to be done and things are being done,” President Granger said.

President Granger is expected to lead the coalition into the upcoming elections. Born on July 15, 1945, President Granger is a retired military officer who served for a time as Commander of the Guyana Defence Force and subsequently as National Security Adviser from 1990 to 1992.

In 2010, he made a successful bid to be elected as the presidential candidate of the People’s National Congress/Reform for the November 2011 general and regional elections. He was leader of the opposition in the National Assembly of Guyana from 2012 to 2015. Granger stood as the opposition coalition’s presidential candidate in the November 2011 general and regional elections, but was defeated. He was elected President in the May 2015 general and regional elections.

He attended Queen’s College, Guyana’s elite and prestigious school, like former Presidents Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Samuel Hinds and scholars such as Walter Rodney and Rupert Roopnaraine. After leaving Queen’s College, where he was a member of the Queen’s College Cadet Corps, Granger joined the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) as an officer cadet in 1965 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in 1966. He received his professional military training at the Army Command and Staff College in Nigeria; the Jungle Warfare Instruction Centre in Brazil; and the School of Infantry and the Mons Officer Cadet School, respectively, in the United Kingdom.

He trained in Britain, then Brazil, then Nigeria, and eventually became commander of the Guyana Defence Force in 1979 and was promoted to the rank of brigadier. Granger was appointed National Security Adviser to the President in 1990[1] and retired from military service in 1992.

Additionally, President Granger also founded the Guyana Review news magazine in 1992 and served as its managing editor. He has researched and published on military, historical and media themes, and is also the author of Guyana’s state media: the quest for control, and A Preliminary Study of Women Soldiers in the Anglophone Caribbean.

As the APNU+AFC Presidential Candidate, he will likely come up against four other contenders for the presidency, including three newcomers from the Liberal and Justice Party; A New and United Guyana Party and the Federal United Party. In the case of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), its Presidential Candidate is Irfaan Ali. His qualifications, however, have been questioned. While President Granger has received the full support of the APNU+AFC coalition, the appointment of Ali as the PPP/C Presidential Candidate was met with major disagreements and objections, particularly from its grassroots supporters.