– had he to vote again against Coalition

FORMER Alliance For Change (AFC) member and Attorney-at-Law Charrandass Persaud has affirmed that if given the opportunity to vote again in the December 21, 2018 no-confidence motion (NCM) against the Coalition he would say ‘yes’ six times instead of three.
Persaud, who returned to Guyana Friday last after 22 months of self-exile made a brief appearance on Kaieteur Radio where he related to listeners that he was overjoyed to return home, especially in time for his sister’s 75th birth anniversary.

“If I have to do it again, instead of three ‘yeses’ this time, I would do six. You know why? I saw everything and now knowing what you know, who is Larry London to be printing birth certificates, is it not obvious that they were trying to put names on birth certificates and they wanted house-to-house registration, and a new list, because they have to add these people to the voters list; that was how they had planned to rig the elections and that was stopped dead in its tracks with the no-confidence to begin with,” Persaud explained
He explained that a lot of people along with high-ranking officials are concerned for his safety, since many are of the view that people will still come after him.
“I don’t want to waste my life away; that night I could have given it up, but now that I am granted a new lease on life I want to preserve it now; and so I have to be extremely careful, my friends are still watching my back,” he said.

Noting that he has not returned to Guyana to live in hiding, Charandass said he will soon be regularly out in the streets again.
Former People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) parliamentarians were bold in their death threats, he said, and thousands prayed for him during his 22-month self-exile.
“I am happy to be back here and I still want to contribute towards the development of not just Guyana, but the lives of people in this country and that was what was lacking; and what I saw lacking in the government that I was part of and so I did my best to change it,” he said.
Persaud maintained that he has not been offered a job by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government, or any other institution for that matter.
“I am back here to see how I can contribute and if it means that the PPP offers me a job that will help me to serve the people better than I could as a lawyer, I might consider that too, but for now I am still here literally trying to get accustomed to everything,” he said.

SWALLOWED UP
The former parliamentarian reflected that the reason he joined the AFC was to bridge the gap between the ethnic divide, but it did not happen because the AFC was swallowed up by the PNC.

This he contended was a deviation from the AFC’s agenda. The former parliamentarian pointed out that a number of high-ranking officials in the PPP/C are not of one race and its leadership reflects the ethnic groups of Guyana.

“We are not Afro-Guyanese or Indo-Guyanese, we have to be Guyanese because we are not going to go anywhere and that racial divide will not be bridged; and so we need to work on preserving the Guyanese culture which is a mixture of a variety of lifestyles, religious practices and different cultural behaviour,” he said.
Persaud said the racial divide must be bridged for Guyana to be fully developed.

“It takes courage to do a wrong, but a greater courage and of a nobler sort to admit the wrongs and I even challenged David Granger and Joe Harmon to admit that they were wrong to the people they lied to, because the Statements of Polls were clear, very clear, that they lost the elections; the only thing they have to do now is to admit to the people,” he asserted.
This he said is the kind of courage that is lacking, not just for party supporters but to the nation.
“They cannot be a part of the development of Guyana, of the social bridging of Guyana; they cannot claim that they have contributed to the progress of young people unless they admit to the lies they committed, the lies that caused this country to be tortured for at least 22 months,” Persaud said.

STUBBORN DEFIANCE
He explained that the no-confidence motion was enough to remove the A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) from office, but the Coalition fought tooth and nail to defy the law and the will of the people.
“When I came out of Parliament I had nothing on me except my briefcase, but between the time I exited Parliament and the time I entered a plane I managed to grab a few pieces of clothes somewhere,” he said.

He added: “I can tell you that I am not worried about my safety, but I am very concerned about my safety because I honestly think with $50,000 in a pocket and a gun in a hand, somebody may want to blow me away. I honestly believe that there are people that are so shallow in their thinking that a man exercises his constitutional right, but it has offended and caused some of them grief by way of losing jobs and the high life, but they did not pay attention to the fact that they caused thousands of people to lose their jobs and live below poverty, hand to mouth as we would say in Guyana; they didn’t stop to think of that at all, they did that to people.”
Persaud, who was expelled from his party because of his vote, said he was motivated to remove the APNU+AFC administration because of the rampant corruption and lack of care it showed in their decision-making.

“All I did was to try to remove the corruption I saw and the fact that they were cheating the very people who put them there, and that was what I did and that was what I wanted to happen, and that is what happened. Now they feel exactly how the cane-cutter and sugar workers felt and that was the basis of my fight against the AFC,” he said.