Change Guyana’s Presidential Candidate, Robert Badal, is appealing to the electorate to move beyond the “racial pattern” of voting because it has taken the country nowhere.
“All these blunders; all these failed policies… I think it is clear, going forward, that Guyana needs to understand that our racial pattern of voting has not taken us anywhere. It has driven us down the road to poverty. The corruption, mismanagement and waste of public resources in the past five decades have robbed us of jobs, and the good life we truly deserve,” Badal said at a press conference at his hotel in Kingston yesterday.
The businessman-turned-politician said that the multibillion-dollar bailouts to the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) and the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), should be enough for the electorate to deduce that the two major political parties that governed Guyana in the post-Independence era leave much to be desired.
“…[Bailouts] of $100B in the last ten years…Fibre-optic cable, $26M and yet no cable; Amaila Falls [Hydro Project] Road, $18M but yet no road; billions after billions on overpriced medical drugs via sole-sourcing from friends; roads and bridges built multiple times…Is this the route we want to take again? My fellow Guyanese, let us not,” he said.
Badal noted that if governments had delivered on their promises to be accountable and transparent, these ‘wastage’ could have been avoided, and Guyana would be in a better state of development.
“These waste and corruption, if we had managed our economy properly, transparently, being accountable, these [monies] could have built five bridges across the Demerara River, put state-of-the-art hospitals in every region, a network of roads and highways linking every region, and elevate the pension and income level of every Guyanese,” he argued.
Change Guyana is not the only party that recognises ethic voting as a major influencer at the upcoming elections. A New and United Guyana (ANUG), in its recently-launched manifesto noted: “based upon our history of ethnic voting ANUG does not expect to win the 2020 elections and thus its programme and promises are based on what it can actually deliver to the Guyanese people by winning the small number of seats it believes is possible to win.”
The party said that it was not formed to ‘dislodge’ the two larger ethnic political parties, but to force them to govern together.
The party vowed that should it win the small number of seats necessary for it to hold a parliamentary balance, it will set about establishing the most consensual, participatory, inclusive, transparent democratic regime in the history of Guyana and even the Caribbean.
