‘Coalition’ has good track record- PM Nagamootoo

Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo has asserted that the Coalition Government has a good track record of following up on its promises.

“It has done so within its first 100 days in office, and has subsequently done so over the past four-plus years,” he wrote in his hard-hitting weekly column, My Turn, which was published in this newspaper two Sundays ago.

Mr. Nagamootoo noted that the Opposition PPP had promised much, but delivered little, and that it has a credibility problem.

Old people, he added, have a creole saying, “seh suh is na do suh” (say so is not do so).
He shared the view of President Granger that promises must be matched by performance. “The Coalition’s performance in a single term is sufficient evidence that while the APNU+AFC manifesto plans are ambitious, with honest leadership they are attainable and achievable,” the Prime Minister declared.

The column drew sharp responses from PPP’s executive Anil Nandlall and the Guyana Times. Mr. Nandlall claimed that the ‘Coalition’ did not fulfill its promise to reform the Constitution. But the Prime Minister, in his column, explained that the government had kick-started the process.

“Within our first 100 days, I appointed a Steering Committee to advise on guidelines and the module for constitutional reform. From its work, a Constitutional Consultative and Reform Bill was tabled in Parliament, and it was sent to a parliamentary committee for consideration. The business of this bipartisan committee was stalled, with no government/opposition consensus on moving forward.”

Mr. Nandlall, a former Attorney-General in the previous PPP government, was a member of that parliamentary committee which did not meet often enough to review the Bill before the National Assembly was dissolved.

The Guyana Times took objection to the Prime Minister’s remarks on the amount in pensions and perks that former president Bharrat Jagdeo had given himself and others, and accused the Coalition government of giving former prime minister Hamilton Green a big pension as well.

The Prime Minister has stated that after the 2015 elections, the new government quickly “pruned the excessive benefits under the Former Presidents Law by placing a cap on the number of vehicles, guards, guns, overseas trips, duty-free concessions and other benefits that Mr. Jagdeo had given to himself (monetised at some $3M monthly), and to his two colleagues who had also served as president.”