Dear Editor,

I REFER to Stabroek News columnist Ralph Ramkarran’s November 26, offing in which he said that the Alliance for Change (AFC) cabinet members of the Coalition Government should resign their ministerial posts, and serve as watchdog parliamentarians in order to bring about a fulfillment of campaign promises, particularly that of constitutional reform, which he claims reluctance on the part of the current administration.

How telling–I expected the learned attorney and former speaker of the National Assembly to look at ways to heal Guyana’s old festering ethnic wounds which is the source of division. Instead, he is fanning the flames of division by resurrecting the old bogey of election rigging. It is my considered opinion that Mr. Ramkarran’s statement is a call for division which is in keeping with the PPP’s old battle call of Aphaan Jaat. There is no real interest in the development of Guyana.

However, Minister Khemraj Ramjattan who served alongside Ramkarran when both were PPP/C executives said, in response to the article that, “he is just pushing vacuous chatter and posited that Ramkarran’s assertions are not grounded in concretised facts but personal views,” and rightly dismissed the assertions of the former People’s Progressive Party executive.

Under this government, people are free to express views without being shot in the streets, nor television stations shut down/threatened with closure or advertisements withheld and as Ramjattan rightly puts it, “This is a free country and more and more this government is going to ensure that free speech be enjoyed by everybody, even those who can talk the very idiotic and the every insulting and offensive. We are going to allow the `chatterati’ to continue to chat and we are not going to block them.”

Editor, it is well known that when all else fails the call for Apan Jhaat, as seen in Jagdeo’s exhortation to their base in the run up to the 2015 election, becomes the clarion. These suggestions are merely to break up the alliance that is keeping the corrupt PPP from regaining power. The Guyanese people do not want a group of white collar thugs who raided of the national purse and are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, murdered by state sanctioned death squads, running their affairs.

Regards
Earl Hamilton