Selection of Elisabeth Harper cannot conceal racism and corruption
Dear Editor,
The People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP) has come down with schizophrenia and is in panic over the merger of the main opposition APNU and AFC, which will contest the May 11, 2015 general elections as a single party. The panic is not misplaced. The coalition portends an end of the corrupt, racist PPP regime.
Combined, the APNU and AFC garnered a majority of votes in the last general elections. They then formed a modus vivendi to control the Parliament, rendering the PPP a minority government.
The PPP government is an ethnocracy that practices institutional racism. Every elections cycle, the party acts like it is bipolar. It pretends to love Afro-Guyanese and secures some votes.
It’s election time in Guyana and the PPP is in a desperate scramble to camouflage its racist image so as to compete with the multi-racial opposition coalition.
Last Saturday the party dumped Prime Minister, Sam Hinds, and hastily selected Mrs. Elisabeth Harper – Director General of the Foreign Service and Ambassador to Caricom, as its Prime Ministerial (PM) candidate.
Elisabeth Harper started off on the wrong footing. Without resigning from the public service, she appeared on the PPP platform with President Donald Ramator on Saturday and declared her candidacy. Her appearance is a breach of public service laws. Mrs. Harper cannot be a candidate for the National Assembly and simultaneously serve ad Director General. This is a reprehensible violation of the Constitution. It is unfortunate that her first act was joining her party in its incessant disregard for the Constitution. She must resign from the public service.
A career diplomat of some repute, Mrs. Harper hitherto never overtly aligned herself with any political party. Her nomination is therefore so superficial, that no one is oblivious to the certainty that she will become another Sam Hinds. Neither are we oblivious to their hoax to trick women to vote for the PPP.
Mrs. Harper has never been a PPP member nor in its leadership. Does the PPP expect us to believe that it will allow such a political novice and outsider, who is an Afro-Guyanese woman, to take over the party and Presidency, if it wins?
The PPP thinks Guyanese have amnesia. It believes that we have forgotten how it eviscerated poor Sam Hinds when President Cheddi Jagan died and by constitutional mandate he ascended to the presidency. The constitution mandates that the Prime Minister shall become President in event the President resigns, dies or becomes incapacitated. The PPP however, made a mockery of the Constitution when President Jagan died.
After Hinds became President, PPP insiders forced him to appoint President Jagan’s wife, Mrs. Janet Jagan as Prime Minister. Once she became Prime Minister, they stunningly forced Hinds to resign as President. He did, and Mrs. Jagan automatically became the President.
Clearly, the PPP recruited Mrs. Harper to court black and women’s votes, but she has done nothing to improve the lives of these two constituencies. Has she worked on the ground to help develop a single local community or preserve any town or village? Has she worked on the ground to improve the lives of women; including ending pervasive violence against women in Guyana? Has she been involved in any women’s organization of any kind?
Has she at least spoken out against violence or discrimination against women, or advocated for gender equality for women in Guyana? Has she ever helped to improve the lives and education of young girls? Has she done anything to address poverty or to preserve the human rights of Guyanese?
Elisabeth Harper implemented the PPP policy that jettisoned Afro-Guyanese from the Foreign Service. When we expressed outrage over the PPP’s all Indian Ambassador corps, and Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon said that there were no Afro-Guyanese qualified to be an Ambassador, Elisabeth Harper remained silent and went along with the pretense.
She benefited directly from this PPP hegemony. She was the only Afro-Guyanese Ambassador who they retained at the time. This was her reward for cutting down her fellow Afro-Guyanese from the service. Does the PPP expect her to now influence us, when they used her to disenfranchise us?
Rickford Burke