Badal biting big

The Change Guyana party is aiming to contest in all 10 Administrative Regions in the coming General and Regional Elections and its Presidential Candidate, Businessman Robert Badal, is confident that this will be possible for the three-week-old party.

“We’ll contest all the Regions. All the Regions. We’re now putting things in place to move out into the Regions. We are only three weeks now so this week we’re going out, we’re going to meet people, small [groups] of people,” Badal told the newspaper on the sidelines of a press conference on Tuesday, assuring:

“We’ll find names for all the Regions”

The public concern is still present that many new political parties often form close to the elections period but are unable to garner enough votes or even requirements for Nomination Day. Contesting parties, according to Guyana’s Electoral System, must contest a minimum of six of the geographical constituencies adding together at least 13 seats for eligibility to contest and submit geographical constituencies list and National Top-up List.

Added to this, each political party must have at least one-third women on the list of candidates validly nominated. Questioned whether the party has taken stock of the representation of women, the Presidential Candidate said: “Of course. We need more women to come forward. I’ll have a group of women in there tomorrow who I’m talking to, about 30 of them, then [there’s also] the Women’s Chamber…we’re inclusive both gender-wise, ethnic wise.”

Meanwhile, he stated that when it comes to the representation of youths, he has to “convince them to be candidates” even as he noted that the party has a strong presence of university students. Just in October, another new party, A New and United Guyana (ANUG), travelled to Linden to launch its party office in the Region but amassed a very low support turn-out.

Badal said that although Change Guyana only recently launched, its campaigning efforts are nothing to be overlooked. “We’re campaigning all the time, we’re on social media…now we’re paying a lot of money to put it out [our campaign] and it’s on everybody’s smartphone. So, they have been campaigning for about a year now,” he said.
Change Guyana has already registered as a party to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) ahead of what’s expected to be “the mother of all elections”.

However, he admitted that it is not likely that the party will meet the capacity to also participate as an observer in the elections. Badal said: “It’s going to be difficult for us to observe because we don’t have the ground [or] foot soldiers there but we’ll rely on the observations of the international organisations, all the newspapers, the Chambers, the private sector.” The party has been hosting weekly press conferences on various topics where the media is allowed to ask questions specific to the topics.