– African and other civil society stakeholders say they have lost respect

The protest letter authored by Olive Cummings Sampson, Chief Executive Officer for the International Decade for People of African Decent Assembly – Guyana (IPADA-G), has been dismissed by numerous African and civil society stakeholder organisations and activists. They have expressed their backing for President Dr. Irfaan Ali’s Global Africa Leadership Award in Ghana.

The correspondence entailed a request for the revocation of President Ali’s accolade.
To this, the stakeholder organisations and activists said: “The organisation’s dispatch is wholly temerarious, reprehensible, and objectionable. We therefore wish to expostulate our firm position on this important matter.”

“In consideration of the foregoing and with due regard to the august reputation of your organisation and its informed nominations criteria, we offer our full and unequivocal support to President Irfaan Ali, on his most deserving GALA award,” they said in a letter to the Chairman and Members of the African Prosperity Network (APN).

President Ali was on Friday bestowed with the Global Africa Leadership Award in Ghana for his strong and transformational leadership since assuming the presidential office in 2020.
Dr. Ali, over the past years, has been championing several causes, many of which involved the maintenance of peace and unity.

The Guyanese leader has also been vocal on matters that involve the global disparities faced by developing countries, as well as matters of women’s and children’s rights.
Most recently, the Head of State has been vocal about the need for reparations to be paid to Caribbean states that were major hubs during the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The letter by the stakeholder organisations and activists read: “IPADA-G has effectively relinquished its UN based mandate and has become appendaged to the political opposition movement of Guyana, with open support and participation in the destabilization and ethnic-polarization campaigns of the political opposition.”

It added: “The organisation has lost our respect and support and therefore does not represent us nor our national interests as a legitimate ‘People of African Decent’ representational body, nor in any capacity whatsoever.”

While rejecting the claims from IPADA-G, they said: “We emphatically reject accusations against President Ali of racism and discrimination as contrived, false, baseless and without any merit whatsoever,” while attesting and supporting claims of inclusivity and non-discrimination.

The group then spotlighted that IPADA-G, since its inception, has populated its Board of Directors and executive with known members and supporters of the opposition party, the People’s National Congress-Reform (now APNU), and openly demonstrated support for the undemocratic efforts of the Coalition Government, of which the APNU was the principal actor in the rigging of the 2020 General and Regional elections.

These brazen efforts which plunged Guyana into a five month long constitutional crisis, were roundly condemned by the international community of election observer nations and bodies.

“The organisation has since attached itself to a vigorous national and international campaign of destabilisation of the Ali Administration and ethnic division of the Guyanese society,” the letter read. “In 2023, the organization and its key financiers and political sponsors presented a dossier of race related and discrimination falsehoods against the PPP/C Government, to the US State Department and Congressional Black Caucus, which was roundly rejected as baseless.”

Notwithstanding this, the group highlighted the numerous initiatives by the PPP/C administration to better the lives of all Guyanese.

For instance, they underscored that in 2020, the government removed Value Added Tax (VAT) on water for all pensioners, the subsidy of which amounts to over $523 million annually and increased monthly pensions by 75 per cent between 2020 and 2024.

It was also said that the government also provides annual electricity subsidies to residents of Region 10, a predominantly black bastion of the ethnic political support base of the opposition.
The total amount of subsidies exceeds $100 billion since its establishment.

It is important to highlight that this is the sole geographic and administrative area that benefits from such a subsidy. Moreover, the region has been allocated a local budget of $7 billion for 2024, marking a significant increase of over 100% since 2020. These were a few of the government’s efforts that were highlighted by the group.