Shutdown organisers should be prepared to take further action
- WPA
Stabroek News
October 17, 2002
The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) says the organisers of the two-day crime shutdown last week should be prepared to take further action and it again called for a power-sharing government of national unity and reconstruction.
The opposition party said in a release yesterday that the organisers should not see their efforts “as a one-shot exercise.”
Expressing concern at what it termed the government’s knee-jerk response to the shutdown, the party singled out Public Service Minister Dr Jennifer Westford for issuing a “threat to government workers (which) was in the worst tradition, bringing back memories of the authoritarianism of the past.”
Westford had warned public servants that they would be subject to disciplinary action for staying away from work during the shutdown exercise.
According to the WPA, the shutdown showed that Guyanese have had enough of the bickering and grandstanding, and it also underscored that they have seen the need for a national solution to the deep national crisis.
Saluting the initiative taken by the group that led the call for the shutdown, the party described the move as “a most timely and courageous act.”
“The mass response shows that the Guyanese people have the capacity to take a united stand when it is most needed. It was also heartening to note that despite attempts by the government to deem the action partisan, the shutdown was an effective non-partisan action in the interest of all,” the release stated.
Meanwhile, the WPA is calling on the Guyana Unite group to “unite with the workers of those employers who participated in the exercise and insist that they be paid for the days of the shutdown.”
“It is wrong,” the party stated, “to condemn certain aspects of criminal behaviour while seemingly encouraging it in another form.”
The WPA reiterated its belief that an end to the crime wave and a solution to the general crisis lie in a broad approach involving the government, the parliamentary opposition parties, and civil society organisations.
The party asserted that “no measure will succeed unless it has the full confidence and support of all the stakeholders.”
Further, it pledged readiness to lend support to any future constructive initiatives aimed at bringing the major political parties and the representatives of civil society together.
Turning to the stewardship of the government, the WPA said that as a “party that was with others in the frontline of the struggle to regain the right to vote freely and have the votes counted,” it was “very concerned at the quality of governance since the PPP came to office in 1992.”
The party said it would shortly release an in-depth analysis of the period, but for now it wished to note that although some of the more vulgar aspects of the pre-1992 order have not re-emerged, the pace of democratisation has been most disappointing.
The WPA posited that the chief obstacles “have been political witch-hunting, half-hearted constitutional reform, (an) upsurge in racial insecurity, and (a) lack of vision and fresh ideas on the part of the government.”
Extra-judicial killings since 1992 have continued unabated, the party said, and that is a serious indictment against the PPP/C.
“The perpetrators of these vicious crimes seem emboldened, if not encouraged, by the signals emanating from the highest levels of government on this question.
The end result of all of this is a nation whose quality of life has not improved much in the last ten years,” the WPA declared.
And it again called on the two major parties to acknowledge that neither can nor should attempt to govern on its own.
The WPA contended that “the sanest option, under all the well-known circumstances, remains the establishment of a power-sharing Government of National Unity and Reconstruction in which all races and classes are seen to have a stake.”