Presidential candidate, Donald Ramotar, and President Bharatt Jagdeo, of the People’s Progress Party/C of Guyana, were greeted with an angry anti-government demonstration outside Club Tobago in Richmond Hill on April 28 at a meet-the-people event.
Placards that read: PPP Laptop Scandal, PNC said Jagdeo and Ramotar run a cocaine government, Stop Police Torture of Guyana Children, and chants of Free Guyana Now, Jagdeo must Go, came from supporters of opposition parties who chided the politicians during Ramotar’s first official visit to New York.
But the demonstration did not hinder the huge welcome from the more than 200 predominately Indo-Guyanese expats inside the venue, who cheered as Ramotar delivered a blistering speech, lambasting the opposition PNC/R for its 28-year dictatorship that he said made Guyana one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere.
Evoking former PNC leader Desmond Hoyte, who he claimed had said that PPP rule would never last, Ramoutar declared: “We we have been in power for 19 and we will rule for another 19.”
“The PNC/R don’t want to speak of the past because they don’t have a past they are proud of, said Ramotar.
Referring to opposition candidate David Granger, Ramotar claimed was a part the PNC ballot box corruption back in the ‘60s, a claim Granger bluntly denied.
Standing again the backdrop of a slogan that read “Let Progress Continue” Ramotar did not lay out a defined campaign agenda, but instead promised to move Guyana forward by continuing the work his party started.
The candidate, who claims to be multi-racial, boasted that the PPP/C handed out 88,000 house lots to Guyanese of all races and built 1,000 schools, creaing equal opportunity for indigenous students of Guyana’s interior, so that no child is left behind.
Ramotar also praised his party for building banks in the various regions, and modernizing the main Georgetown hospitals where he said heart surgeries and kidney transplants are performed.
“We have improved the quality of life for Guyanese in the health, education, housing, business and economic sectors, asserted the PPP candidate.
Ramotar did not allow questions from the media or audience, hurled accusations at the main opposition, to applause and cheers of the crowd, but for one heckler who questioned Ramotar about crime in Guyana.
Ramotar in turn jeered the national by saying ‘you are living here that is why there is no more crime in Guyana, without missing a beat.
He then went on to commend his party by saying that the most important factor for development “is the people of our country, and that is what we have been investing in for the last 19 years.”
General elections scheduled for August of this year.
