GENERAL Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C), Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo has described the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) as a “deeply divided party”, highlighting its inability to recover from its continuous declining track record, in-fighting within the party and claims of a ploy to remove the party’s chairman, Aubrey Norton.
Dr. Jagdeo made these assertions during his weekly press conference on Thursday last at the party’s Freedom House headquarters in Robb Street, Georgetown.
According to Dr. Jagdeo, he is intricately aware of backbiting currently facing Norton and he sympathises with the position Norton finds himself in.
“The hounds [are] after Norton now, and he’s now making it easier for himself by sometimes the utter nonsense that he says at [his] press conferences. They will go after him,” Dr. Jagdeo noted.
He added, “A number of people have called me from their side, they share information with us from the inside about all that’s going on and it’s not a pretty picture that you can paint about their state of affairs there. It’s a deeply divided party, some based on failures of the past, [and] lots of the characters who are still here have come with baggage.”
There were discussions that the recently concluded Local Government Elections (LGE) would have been a litmus test on Norton’s leadership of the APNU, and the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R).
Norton is also leader of the PNC/R, which is the largest faction in the APNU coalition. Norton has been leader of the party for just over a year and a half now, but has faced a litany of controversies during his short reign, including financial impropriety and lack of accountability, and turning a blind eye to racial hostility in the party. This has seen members of the executive questioning his leadership and his ability to increase support for the party.
“There was a plan to remove Norton even before the local government election and sometimes I pity Norton. Let me be frank with you and I can speak my mind now, because when you have cutthroats…hoping you would fail so they can come after you, then it must be a lonely place for him in Congress Place. He probably wouldn’t even know who to trust in the area,” Dr. Jagdeo noted.
During the LGEs, the APNU statistically performed incrementally worse than it did when the LGEs were last held in the 2018. This was further compounded by the PPP/C making further inroads in many APNU strongholds such as Georgetown, New Amsterdam, Linden and other townships.
Overall, the PPP/C has won 906, or 74.26 per cent, of the 1,220 seats in the 80 LAAs across the country; this marked an increase from 779 seats that the party won in 2018.
Meanwhile, the APNU only managed to pick up 275 seats, or 22.5 percent of the seats across the country.
Conversely, Dr. Jagdeo noted that not only is the PPP/C united, but the party is currently working together to decide on its Proportional Representation (PR) candidates to take up seats on the councils of the various LAAs across Guyana.