According to Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, over the last four and a half years, a few rich indo-Guyanese benefitted the most from the influence of former Minister of State, Joseph Harmon who is now the Director-General at the Ministry of the Presidency
Jagdeo said this earlier today as he chided Harmon for statements made at a political meeting in Buxton recently.
Demerara Waves had reported Harmon slamming the People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C) for attempting to win black votes.
He said, “It is really a contemptuous act on the part of the PPP that says ‘look, once you put up a Black face deh, Black people are going to vote for you…”
Harmon said that Jagdeo’s announcement that he was going after Black votes amounted to being “contemptuous of our people.”
Jagdeo claims that because the APNU+AFC has no policies or good record to use for purposes of campaigning, it will resort to “polarizing our people.”
Jagdeo told the media, “He (Harmon) goes there to say that Mark Phillips is a token. I do not understand what he is implying because if Mark Phillips is a token…Ramjattan and people like Nagamootoo must also be tokens.”
Jagdeo continued, “And then he says that Bharrat Jagdeo saying that he is going after black votes is ‘contemptuous of our people.’ I thought our people, especially for those in government, supposed to be all the people of Guyana. But, what I am intrigued by is that suddenly, Harmon identifies with Guyanese because it is election time, they become his people but they were not his people in the four and a half years when the security who worked with him in the 2015 period can’t see him or can’t find a job.”
Jagdeo said that Harmon has been giving ordinary afro Guyanese a hard time, “but he has been hob-knobbing with the rich Indian guys for the last four years because that is where the corrupt cabal is…Giving them contracts that they should not have gotten. But now election time, afro Guyanese are his people.
Jagdeo said too, “I can send you over 50 pictures of the people who he (Harmon) is close with, those are his people.”
Jagdeo told the media that he maintains that the PPP is deficient in terms of Afro Guyanese members and “we want to correct it. We have gone to every home in South Georgetown with a copy of our manifesto informing them of our plan and letting them know that we will have their backs. We are not going after Afro Guyanese votes as tokenism.”
He claims that on the other hand, Harmon was unable to tell the people of Buxton “how they will get a job tomorrow, or how they will be better off. He is just trying to polarize the country.
