King to brief Dr Anthony on PPP/PNC dialogue
CARICOM Facilitator, Maurice King, has left Guyana for a meeting with St Lucia's Prime Minister, Dr Kenny Anthony. The meeting is expected to take place early this week, ahead of Dr Anthony's trip to Guyana to meet President Bharrat Jagan and leaders of the political parties in Guyana as well as civil society organisations. Dr Anthony had the responsibility assigned him by the CARICOM Heads for monitoring the dialogue between the PPP/Civic and the PNC, one of the menu of measures of the CARICOM-brokered Herdmanston Accord. Before leaving Guyana, King chaired the last meeting of the dialogue at which the two sides presented their proposals on the issues of the establishment of an Elections Commission and land distribution and house lot allocation. The two issues have been named as priority by the PPP/Civic and the PNC respectively. The establishment of the Elections Commission is receiving attention not only in the dialogue but is to be fast tracked in the discussions of the parliamentary Select Committee which is considering the Constitution Reform Commission report. The government is anxious to have the Elections Commission established so that it could hold local government elections next year. The local government elections were last held in 1994 and have had to be postponed twice since they were due in 1997. The government has expressed concern that the mandate of the local government bodies should be renewed. However, the opposition parties have expressed a desire that the elections should be held after the recommendations for local government by the Constitution Reform Commission have been implemented. Land distribution and house lot allocation has been a sore issue for the PNC and it has been pressing for representation on the regional land selection committees to be based on performance at the December 1997 elections. It also wants to be represented on the regional housing committees. The PNC has been seeking information from the PPP/Civic as to the amount of land and house lots which have been distributed since 1994 and other related details. However, these have not yet been supplied. Before the break down of the dialogue in February, discussions on this issue had deadlocked with the PPP/Civic indicating that it was an issue which would have to be dealt with by the minister of agriculture. There are fears that a similar logjam could be encountered particularly at this time where the discussions are on essentially political party issues and decisions which would require implementation by the government would need to be agreed at that level. However, PNC sources say that there should be no need for any delay in implementation since almost all the members of the Cabinet are members of the PPP/Civic central executive committee and would have approved the undertaking given by their dialogue team.
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