Facts, it is said are stubborn things. No amount of false propaganda dished out by the APNU+AFC can diminish the enormous strides made by the current PPP/C administration in all facets of national life.
During a recent press conference by Vice-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, he debunked a number of misleading statements made by the political opposition. One such statement was that that the PPP/C does not have a development plan.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As pointed out by Dr. Jagdeo, there are nearly 3000 pages of strategic planning embodied in seven volumes, all of which speaks to strategic planning and development. These plans did not emanate out of thin air but came about through a series of iterative engagements with key stakeholders including civil society.

The records will show that immediately after the PPP/C assumed power on October 1992, it embarked on a process of national consultations aimed at the compilation of a national development strategy. When the APNU+AFC coalition under former President David Granger took office in May 2015, it immediately scuttled the plan and replaced it with a vague and amorphous Green State Development Strategy which failed to materialise because of its lack of vision and ill-conceived nature. As noted by Dr. Jagdeo, the Green State plan concocted by the Granger administration turned out to be a burden on the treasury and had no revenue generating component.

It was not until the PPP/C was returned to power in August 2020 that the National Development Strategy was once again updated and put into operation to take into account the country’s carbon resources.
For Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton to say that the PPP/C administration is governing this country without a development plan is at best disingenuous and a deliberate attempt to distort the facts.

The fact of the matter is that it was the APNU+AFC that stood in the way of development and as pointed by Vice-President Dr. Jagdeo, the political opposition is now seeking to rewrite history in its futile attempt to downplay the monumental progress made by the PPP/C administration over the years.
The PNC has had a history of failed promises since the days of Forbes Burnham and later Desmond Hoyte who replaced him. From the infamous ‘Feed, House and Clothe’ the Nation to ‘Eat Less, Sleep Less and Work Harder’ the nation was fed with an unending series of sloganeering and empty promises which were never grounded in any serious and informed developmental plan. One consequence of such disjointed governance style was a progressive decline of economic and social progress. Not surprisingly, the country was reduced to one of the poorest in the western hemisphere by the early 1990’s.

The PPP/C administration must be commended for its visionary leadership. Guyana currently has one of the most advanced development plan the genesis of which can be traced since the early days of the PPP/C administration. Former President and now Vice-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo was one of the main architects of that development model based on a National Development Strategy (NDS) which was aimed at articulating a policy framework which formed the basis for determining development priorities and guiding and guiding international assistance.
That monumental task was undertaken by 23 sector-specific Technical Working Groups (TWGs) whose membership represented a wide range of stakeholders drawn from government, academia, NGOs, labour, the donor community and the private sector.

Guyana is blessed to have the guiding hand of former President Dr. Jagdeo who can be described as the main architect of Guyana’s economic development. Under the visionary leadership of President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Vice-president Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo and Prime Minister Mark Phillips, the prospects of a better and secure Guyana is assured.